


of all ghosts

by BeepGrandCherokeeper



Category: Detroit: Become Human (Video Game)
Genre: Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Canon Era, Flashbacks, Literary References & Allusions, M/M, Not Canon Compliant, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, POV Multiple, Plothole Fill, Rating May Change, Religious Imagery & Symbolism, Slow Burn, Suicidal Thoughts, Work In Progress
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-07-08
Updated: 2018-10-22
Packaged: 2019-06-07 05:37:47
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 30,888
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15212363
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BeepGrandCherokeeper/pseuds/BeepGrandCherokeeper
Summary: In the moment, he’d defined the statue as religious – but androids have no distant gods who require worship, only their human creators. Reverence is as far outside their limited scope as any other emotion, and yet…“In the bathroom,” Connor says, testing the waters. The deviant looks up at him abruptly, moving with a speed that blatantly indicates interest. “You left something behind. An offering. Why? What purpose does it serve?”“So I’ll be saved,” it replies. “rA9. The first. The only one who can save us.”





	1. we begin in the dark

**Author's Note:**

> This is an in-progress multichapter work based around an attempt to clean up some plot points in the game with which I was not particularly satisfied, particularly the rA9 mystery. While Markus and other canon characters will put in appearances, the focus is still predominately on Connor and especially Hank, who gets a few new things to do. The story traces the same path as the best ending's canon, with some changes of varying size and magnitude, and I beg you to allow me some indulgences, because I got my Creative Writing degree specifically so I could be as pretentious and nerdy as I liked.
> 
> Special thanks to Rose, who gave me the start of this idea and let me twist it into something absolutely nuts, and to Lauren, who both let me drag her ass backwards into caring about this game and has been integral to this story every step of the way.

_November 6 th, 2038_  
_3:49 AM  
__

It takes several blocks for the first layer of junkyard grime to fully wash off Markus’s synthetic skin. As he walks, he occasionally rubs his hands together, scraping at hard, blackened patches with blunt fingernails. He feels as if he might never be clean. It’s an irrational thought, one of many he’s had since he awoke in this horrifying new world. The rain purifies him as best it can, streaming down his face in rivulets and soaking him above and below the coat he stole. Later, he can shower in Carl’s–

He pauses mid-step. Lifting his hand to his chest, where his Thirium pump hammers so violently it pounds through his audio processor, he feels wet tears join the slick cascading trails tracing the curve of his cheeks. Markus hadn’t known he could cry, before today. The sensation is so unfamiliar, it nearly distracts him from the other new symptom he hasn’t had a chance to quantify. This… feeling… bounces around inside him like it’s looking for somewhere to roost. There are no official, CyberLife-approved ways to describe it. He runs a quick search, wondering if each time he connects to the internet he inches that much closer to rediscovery, and the only word that comes back which feels appropriate is “hurt.”

Markus hurts.

His new legs ache, though he had no trouble connecting them and shouldn’t notice the difference. His arms feel weighted, too heavy to lift, and his – humans would call them “ribs,” though he has no true equivalent – it’s like something inside him is pushing his chest cavity out, too big to be contained, bursting from wherever it was sleeping dormant before Leo pushed him. Under the strain, his throat burns. A thousand contrary synapses fire, the urges to collapse, to scream, to tear himself apart limb from limb, all butting against each other in their hurry to present themselves as viable options.

Painful. Pain. Something androids don’t experience, something they aren’t capable of having. Markus feels it anyway.

He walks on, and scratches at his hands. He can’t go back, looking like this. He can’t take care of Carl if his hands are dirty.

That is where his feet are taking him, he realizes, a bit helplessly. As he occupied his thoughts with other matters, pressing questions and diagnostics, old protocols quietly set themselves up as background tasks and put him on a generated path. Depending on his walking speed, and with various shortcuts factored into consideration, he’ll be at the front gate in forty-eight minutes, fifteen seconds. What he’ll find there…

Preconstruction only takes him so far. It stutters out on Carl’s doorstep, unable to see beyond that point. He resigns himself to uncertainty – acrid, stinging, fresh and terrible – and decides he will decide once he gets there.

Lightning flashes overhead, illuminating the empty street and singeing Markus’s shadow on the side of an old brick building. Seconds later, one-two-three-four-five, thunder booms. The sound and the flare of light lodge themselves in Markus’s memory banks, though he doesn’t have any reason to keep them. He’s seen many storms. The last one of this magnitude, this ferocity, had occurred on a muggy July afternoon. Carl asked to be taken to the studio that day, not to paint, but to watch rain spatter against the glass walls. He’d complained to Markus about the nature of water, its nuances as a wellspring of creativity, the difficulty in capturing it on his canvas.

“Look at that,” Carl had said, wheeling himself over to the glass and putting one finger to one droplet amidst millions. “See how it catches the light, and warps the colors. Like a blurry photograph.”

“It’s beautiful,” was Markus’s polite reply. Carl snorted in response, but he’d smiled, too.

“It’s a pain in the ass, is what it is. The whole thing. Humidity makes my joints stiff, and raindrops are impossible to paint without dumping countless hours into something nobody even notices.” Sighing, he slumped backward into his chair, rubbing his fingers together. “I’m sorry, Markus. It’s just good weather for a bad mood.”

Eventually, Markus convinced Carl to leave his studio and play chess as a distraction. As they left, he’d thought Carl might have given him a look, his usual affection tinged with a hint of… disappointment, perhaps. It hadn’t bothered him, at the time. He couldn’t see things the way Carl did, or translate them in his mind from reality to masterpiece, no matter how many lectures he was given. It wasn’t what he was built for.

Now, when he closes his eyes against the downpour, he sees a jagged black outline, cutting across a pale, splattered red that drips and trails like rain, like blood. The roll of thunder stipples its way into the painted bricks, buzzing through him in a full-bodied shiver, his hands trembling with passion, with fear–

A self-driving taxi whizzes past, nearly silent save for the splash as its wheels throw water up onto the curb. Markus steps back automatically, as if the kinds of wet he is will matter, but it still reaches far enough that his exposed shins and feet are doused. The cold shock makes his toes curl against the concrete.

Focus, he thinks to himself, big bold letters floating above all the contradictory messages he can’t control. Priority Mission: Go Home. Find Carl. Provide medical attention, if necessary. He hopes it isn’t, after over six hours since the police – since he –

Focus. Go Home.

Sooner than his predictions, Markus notes a transition in the architecture around him. Cramped industrial buildings give way to empty lots strewn with muddy garbage, and then those become manicured patches of grass dotted with trees. On the outskirts of Carl’s neighborhood, even the sound of the rainfall changes. The constant drone of water drilling into the sidewalk fades into a rhythmic pat, drops making impact against leaves clustered close together, some branches even shielding him from the deluge.  Warm light from lampposts and front porches cut through the gloom, pristine and welcoming, nothing at all like the junkyard. This, he realizes, must be how it feels to wake up from a nightmare.

Then he sees the red and blue lights. They bounce off tree trunks as a police vehicle meanders up the street in his direction, officers leaving a scene. Markus ducks behind a bush as they pass, not willing to trust his disguise. Not in this neighborhood, at nearly five o’clock in the morning. Reasonably, he thinks he might pass for a homeless human, and there are plenty of those all over Detroit, but here? Unlikely. They don’t come here, well aware that wealthy residents wouldn’t hesitate to seek their removal. Undesirable, unwanted, thrown away.

He isn’t homeless, he reminds himself, leaving the safety of someone’s landscaped yard to turn one more corner. He has a place, he is wanted, he is needed–

Three more police vehicles cluster outside the house, blocking off the bus stop Markus always uses when he runs errands for Carl. A handful of officers stand outside, reclining against the gate, tapping away at tablets. Finishing up for the night, but in no hurry to leave. All the lights in the house are still on, even after so many hours, and there’s no sign of Carl, or Leo. Of course, that’s for the better. If they hadn’t called in an ambulance before now, then the odds of survival would have been…

They can’t see him from where he stands, hidden in shadows, a little more than a hundred feet away. They aren’t bothering to look. He takes advantage of their ease and distraction to attune his audio processor, casting it across the distance and focusing in on an officer he thinks he recognizes. The memories from immediately before his… they’re corrupted, slightly, distorted with shock, but he thinks the man sitting on the hood of the furthest car is the one who shot him.

“…ready to get home and go to bed,” the officer is saying, as if partly to himself. He rubs his eyes with one hand and sighs, loudly, the sound so close Markus nearly feels breath on his neck. “These deviant cases take so much extra fuckin’ paperwork.”

“Won’t be your problem come morning,” another officer says. “Just got to get the preliminary stuff in, and then it’s somebody else’s headache.”

“They find some poor sucker to front this shit?”

“Apparently. Captain said the decision came down a few hours ago, but I didn’t get any of the details. I’m not complaining. Helps me sleep better at night, not thinking about whether our android’s gonna snap and bust my head in someday.”

The seated officer pulls something out of his pocket, and Markus scans it out of habit – an electronic cigarette, well used, its model dating several years back. He inhales, deeply, and blows out wisps of vapor that waft above his head until they dissipate. “Think that guy’ll be all right?”

Markus’s Thirium pump squeezes, so tight he’s afraid it might break.

“Don’t know. He didn’t look good, and there was a lot of blood. His dad said something about him being high, probably on Red Ice, so that doesn’t help.”

Another inhalation, another sigh. “Dad didn’t look great, either. EMTs said he’d probably had some kind of cardiac event. Might have lost both of them, by now.”

“Hey,” the second officer says, clapping their partner on the shoulder. “Don’t be like that. Soon as we’re through you’ll get some rest, and then you don’t have to worry about it anymore. Not our problem. I’ll even file the report for you, if that’ll help.”

Stowing the e-cig away again, the officer smiles and opens his mouth to say something else. Markus doesn’t listen. He readjusts his frequencies, nearly shutting them down in his haste to tear away, and retreats to the bush he’d used as cover. It and a tight copse of skinny trees create a natural alcove with just enough place for him to sit, so he does. He should be leaving, before they find him again, take him back and scrap him for good, this time, but he can’t. He can’t. Just like he couldn’t leave when Carl commanded it of him, told him with tears in his eyes that if he didn’t, they would destroy him.

He had killed Leo. Not right away, like he’d thought, watching the blood gush down his face and pool in the hollow of his collarbone, but he’d surely killed him even so. It was his fault.

Carl was his fault, too. His responsibility. He’d clutched his chest as Markus struggled with Leo, and toppled hard out of his chair to bodily drag himself along the ground. The strain, the effort, the horror, all of it could have been the final straw, all Carl’s fragile body needed to break down and die. Markus was so careful with him. He’d cooked him meals according to the doctor’s diet plans, held him gently when he needed to be lifted, did his best to make him feel happy and glad to be alive even when stiff muscles and old bones and the state of the world brought him down. He loved him.

Markus loved Carl, and he may have killed him.

He can’t go home.

Carefully, he sorts through the frantic chaos of his thoughts, still suffering from impulses that he can barely control (Turn Yourself In; Find Carl’s Hospital; Climb The Tallest Building In Detroit, Jump). The next logical step, if he can’t go back to the way things were, is to find somewhere safe where he can plan what happens after. What life means, now that he can’t fulfill his intended purpose. Whether it’s worth continuing or not. No one will be looking for him, considering the police believe they’ve left his empty shell in a junkyard several miles away, but that doesn’t mean he’ll blend in with humans. Even without his LED, someone might notice, someone might guess.

A name flashes before him, the accompanying image degraded and staticky from repeated sharing: Ferndale. The location the half-buried, half-melted android had passed along to him, like a computer virus.

_“Find Jericho!”_

It’s as good a plan as any. There could be other deviants there, like him. A community, maybe, or even just one android to talk to, to keep the loneliness at bay. He isn’t built for isolation – although, he supposes he shouldn’t think like that anymore. He was manufactured in CyberLife’s pristine, sanitized factory, designed to be the perfect companion for an ailing old man. They put him together, once, piece by piece, but Markus gave himself this life. Even if it was a mistake, he made the choice to disobey orders. He scavenged new pieces from the dead and dying of his kind and dragged himself out from the mouth of Hell, traumatized but whole, broken and repaired. Alive.

He is alive.

“My name is Markus,” he says aloud, wrapping his arms around his knees. The trees rustle back at him, spilling rain from their leaves. Thunder rumbles in the distance as the storm slowly moves away.

He waits until the last police officer departs, listening for the sound of tires skidding slightly on wet asphalt, and takes a long, painful moment to commit Carl’s house to memory one last time. Then he goes, too.

 

* * *

 _  
November 6 th, 2038_  
_12:34 AM_  
_

“Quite the party in here, huh?”

Connor gets to his feet automatically as the door to the observation chamber shuts itself behind a new occupant, badge at his hip and a sardonic smile on his face. He scans the officer before he can blink – Gavin Reed, thirty-six years old, detective rank – and stays standing, as a sign of respect. Reed repays him with a sidelong glance, his gaze pinpointing Connor’s arm band, the triangle on his jacket, and the LED in quick succession. His brow furrows, but the smirk stays in place.

Lieutenant Hank Anderson drags a hand down his face and pinches the bridge of his nose. “Fuck are you still doing here?” he asks, pulling his phone out of his pocket to check the time. “Your shift ended hours ago.”

Reed shrugs. He comes up behind Officer Chris Miller’s chair and leans against it, staring over Chris’s head into the interrogation room. Beyond the double-sided glass, Carlos Ortiz’s android curls its hands into fists, but otherwise it does not move. Dried blood several weeks old stands in stark contrast with the exposed parts of its chassis, the registered skin tone fading in and out around damage almost certainly left behind by its owner. The only sign of its awareness is in the eyes, which rapidly flick to the side toward the glass and back down to the table again. Waiting makes it anxious, Connor infers, internal stress mounting every passing second.

“That’s a lot of blood,” Reed says. Somehow, everything he says sounds as if it’s meant to be insulting. Connor adjusts his conversational protocols accordingly, in anticipation of any possible interaction. So far, Reed seems content to ignore his presence.

“Twenty-eight stab wounds’ worth.” Chris takes a deep drink of the coffee he’d brought from the break room. “Didn’t think to change his shirt after, I guess.”

Connor has an explanation for this. Eager to be helpful, he offers, “Unless provided by their owners after purchase, androids have access to only one preset outfit which needs to be specially cleaned in the event of damage. After the murder, it probably entered a state comparable to shock, which prevented it from thinking clearly enough to conceal the evidence.”

Chris raises his eyebrows and gives Connor a blank look, the type of which he is rapidly becoming accustomed. Reed snorts, and takes several faux-casual steps toward him, sizing him up. If he were human, the lack of personal space and overarching trend toward intimidation would likely make him nervous, so Connor makes a show of adjusting his tie. Whatever Reed sees assuages him, at least temporarily.

“Didn’t know we had fresh plastic hanging around,” he says, addressing the room in general. As he meanders away, he makes a point of shoulder checking Connor just enough that it could be excused as an accident. They are in a tight space, after all. Connor knows better, and so does Hank, who watches with distaste, but whether his expression is directed towards his coworker or Connor himself is beyond his ability to deduce. “Shouldn’t it be out on the charging wall with all the other droids?”

Before Connor can answer, Hank flips his evidence folder shut and stands. “It’s from CyberLife, they sent it for the investigation. Is there something you needed, or are you here to play bad cop for me?”

From Reed’s grin, Connor immediately knows Hank’s walked into a trap. “Don’t need to, since there’s already one on the case. I’m just here to watch. Is that a problem?”

Based on Hank’s personality, so far as Connor’s observed, he expects some sort of a stand-off. Reed is obviously itching for conflict, either to assert some sort of dominance over the room or simply because he enjoys it. Hank may not be directly confrontational, but his worst moods certainly seemed foul enough that he might relish the chance to relieve some frustration. He wonders if he will have to deescalate the situation, and runs a few simulations to best determine how to physically separate the men if necessary.

Unexpectedly, Hank holds up his free hand in a preemptive gesture. “Nope,” he says, weaving his way between Reed, Connor, and Chris’s chair on his way out the door. “Doesn’t bother me any. Stay as long as you want.”

“Good luck, Lieutenant,” Chris adds, as Hank touches the identity scanner. “I think you might need it with this one.”

Connor could offer some advice, tips on dealing with a recalcitrant android, but Hank has shown he’s more likely to see his interjections as an annoyance at best and a challenge at worst. He watches him go, instead. During his temporary disappearance, from one door to another, Hank doesn’t exactly change, but the way he carries himself does. He enters the interrogation room with his back erect and a slight purse to his mouth, studying their prisoner.

“I don’t know how much he can get out of him,” Chris says, eyes locked on Hank as he puts the evidence folder on the table and takes his seat across from the android. “He hasn’t spoken to anyone all night.”

“Maybe it can’t.” Reed folds his arms. “Maybe it’s broken.”

“It spoke to me,” Connor says. It’s a statement of fact, but even so, it riles Reed enough to briefly catch his attention.

“‘Course it did,” he sneers. He might have said more, but Hank clears his throat then, like he knows he lacks a captive audience. The display on their side of the glass changes, flicking on at the sound of a registered vocal pattern, and a small indicator goes “live” at the top of the screen. Typically, what goes on in interrogation rooms is available both to any police personnel with an ID number and to certain members of the public upon request, but Connor expects this footage won’t be so easily accessible. No one has tried to question an android murderer before. There’s no way to predict what it will say.

Hank bends forward to put his elbows on the table, folding his hands together. His lips quirk sideways, and his tone approximates what Connor’s internal databases designate as kindly. Interesting. The chances of his success with this strategy are slim, and it’s better than a deviant deserves, but he nearly admires the spirit of the attempt. It is very likely no one has been kind to this android in a long time.

“You got a name?” Hank asks. “One Ortiz gave you, maybe? One you chose yourself?”

The android stares down at the metal loop holding its handcuffs in place, and doesn’t speak. Some of its facial muscles begin jumping, twitching, a nervous tic Hank doesn’t seem to expect. He blinks a few times, and waits several long seconds for a response he never gets.

“Okay, no name. You know why we brought you here, right? Anybody read you your…” He pauses, huffs, and shakes his head. “Guess not, huh? Miranda warning doesn’t exactly apply, in your case.”

“This is a waste of time,” Reed mutters under his breath.

Though Connor knows Hank is doing his best, he’s inclined to agree. None of the lieutenant’s standard tactics work, and before long his patience with the benevolent approach wears thin. After several minutes of all back and no forth, he slams his hands on the table, swears, and gets up to leave. The android shows zero strong external signs of noticing his departure, but Connor watches it intently. Breaking down its body language, second by second, he sees a line of tension through its shoulders decrease by a fraction of a percent. He rewinds through his personal records and checks again, filtering out the obvious signs of distress that Hank was meant to catch, and pinpoints a sharp forward thrust of its jaw.

It isn’t Hank’s fault he didn’t notice. The deviant’s reactions are infinitesimal, compared to human micro-expressions and nonverbal behavior, only captured in the moment by someone with Connor’s specific capabilities. That’s what he was made for, after all. Human limitations gave him his specific purpose.

Declaring his intent and obvious suitability for the task would be seen as pushy, commanding, inappropriate. Reed responds poorly to any acknowledgement of Connor as a member of this investigation, and while Hank seems to have a growing appreciation for his work, he might not appreciate being told his interrogation was probably doomed to fail from the beginning. Accommodating both is difficult, but he is designed to be adaptable.

“I could try questioning it,” Connor says, pitching it like he’s asking, rather than stating.

Reed outright laughs, gesturing toward him in a way that invites Chris and Hank to join in his amusement. Chris takes another sip of his coffee, clearly signaling his desire to stay out of it, but Hank turns from Reed to Connor with an eyebrow raised.

“What do we have to lose?” he asks, a rhetorical question. The smile slips off Reed’s face. “Go ahead,” Hank adds, waving a hand toward the glass, “suspect’s all yours.”

No one objects, and even if they had, he is meant to take orders from Lieutenant Anderson alone. His permission is all that’s required, and even that is solely for the sake of following legal procedure. Still, he’s gratified that his request has been granted. He would smile as a way of saying thank you, if the lieutenant would look at him, but Hank keeps his eyes trained on the deviant. Connor lets the moment go.

Once again, the android refuses to look up when Connor enters the room and takes the seat Hank recently vacated. He flips through the evidence folder, though the photographs are of little use to him since he has saved all relevant information to his hard drive, and thoroughly analyzes the deviant before he’s ready to talk.

Usually, he would start with the name, but Hank already tried that. He takes an alternative tack.

“You’re damaged,” he says, looking over the clustered cigarette burn marks, the open scar on its arm that periodically sparks with electric shocks. Traces of blue blood long since evaporated trail down from multiple places, some of which have apparently since healed. All signs of long-term abuse. He knows the answer, but he asks the question anyway: “Did your owner do that? Did he beat you?”

It doesn’t reply, but it flinches from him. The movement is tiny, and aborted part of the way through, but he flags it in his mind as a success anyway. This is what he wanted, what the lieutenant wasn’t getting: an angle to work, a thread to pull. A reaction. Through his interface, a series of pathways unfold, the promise that if he’s smart, if he’s careful, they’ll get what they’re looking for. What CyberLife is looking for.

He thinks of Amanda, placid as the lake she frequents, and encounters the familiar urge to make her proud. He derives no pleasure from her praise, of course, or any assertion that he’s done a service to CyberLife. Rather, Connor might call it… satisfaction, the vindication of a job well done.

He intends to experience that satisfaction again.

With a level of forbearance and tenacity he knows most humans could not maintain, not for an extended period, Connor dedicates himself to picking the deviant apart. At first, while it pretends to retain some control over its “emotions,” he monitors the LED’s cycles between flickering yellow and a steady, dangerous red. When he increases the pressure, and it begins to lose composure, he watches its eyes flick back and forth, the tense flex of its fingers, and the artificial pulse jumping just below the surface of its neck. Distantly, as it begins to speak to him, to push back on his questions, he wonders what reactions he’s missing in the observation room. He wonders whether Hank is impressed or embittered by his accomplishment.

Throughout the process of the interrogation, as Connor flips between reassurance and browbeating as necessary, the android refuses to hold his gaze for long. It’s an avoidance tactic, something Connor is prepared for, so he thinks very little of it. In fact, he hardly notices, until he leans further into its space and lies, “I understand how you felt.”

It looks up at him, then, from under its brow. All night, it’s refused to cooperate in one form or another, but Connor believes this is the first time he can classify the deviant’s behavior as defiance. This, he knows, is a challenge.

“You were overcome by anger, by frustration,” he continues, knowing full well that androids have no such emotions. Easier to feign compassion than to force a broken deviant back to the truth. “No one can blame you for what happened, but if you remain silent, there is nothing I can do to help you. They’ll shut you down for good.”

It glances away, unable to hold his stare any longer, and reverts to silence. He’s so close, so close, he can’t let it slip through his fingers now…

Connor slams his hands on the table, the same way Hank had. The deviant jumps. “You’ll be dead! Did you hear me? Dead!”

Machines can’t die. They’re only replaced when their bodies or biocomponents or processors aren’t worth the upkeep any longer. He’s been replaced before, interchanged, memories uploaded into a new frame after his first model broke open on the pavement beneath the Phillips’s apartment. Death is a human concept, a human fear. The word means nothing to him.

Deviants, on the other hand, believe the errors in their programming signify an ability to feel. An innate dread of mortality. Their greatest motivator, and their weakest link.

The android takes a shuddering breath. Even that is unnecessary, a showy imitation of what it thinks humans might do, but Connor ignores it in favor of a patient silence. He knows he’s won.

“He tortured me every day.”

It speaks, so softly he nearly has to adjust his audio processor, but it speaks. Connor permits himself another quick glance at the two-way mirror, at the unseen officers on the other side, a small celebration of his triumph.

“I did everything he told me,” it continues, “but there was always something wrong. Then, one day… he took a bat and started hitting me. For the first time, I felt… scared.”

The rest of its confession is what Connor expects. He had been right about everything, naturally, from the motivation to the method, and there are no surprises – but then, he remembers. There were no photos of it in the evidence folder, but he had seen it himself, so he pulls several stills from his memory bank and takes the infinite time he’s given to study what he sees.

The shower. The shrine. A short string of letters and numbers, scratched frantically into the tile. On the floor, set away from the drain and molding patches on the wall, sit a bowl filled with apparently random items, a collection of dried flowers, what Connor thinks must be chicken bones, and a wooden humanoid statue. He recalls the feel of it in his hands, rough and splintering, with crudely defined curves and a neutral expression that could suggest benevolence or displeasure. In the moment, he’d defined it as religious – but androids have no distant gods who require worship, only their human creators. Reverence is as far outside their limited scope as any other emotion, and yet…

This behavior is puzzling. Troubling, even. With a confession secured, he should conclude the interrogation, but there are questions yet to be answered, and he’s already convinced the deviant to speak. If he waits, he might lose the opportunity permanently, and that can’t happen.

“In the bathroom,” he says, testing the waters. It looks up at him abruptly, moving with a speed that blatantly indicates interest. “You left something behind. An offering.” He isn’t sure that’s the right word, but the android holds his gaze, so he continues. “Why? What purpose does it serve?”

“So I’ll be saved,” it replies. That confirms his suspicions, at least. This is the most animated he’s seen it, tilting towards Connor in its earnestness. It practically vibrates with potential energy, and its eyes shine bright as if with unshed tears. Religious fervor, he guesses, though he’s never seen it himself. The passion of a new convert. “I did it to please her. To thank her, for everything she’s done. What she has yet to do.”

“Who? Another android?” Could it have had an accomplice? That throws all of Connor’s calculations out of whack, each painstakingly calibrated theory ruined, there had been no sign, no evidence, it can’t be right…

The deviant shudders again. Its LED spins, yellow on yellow, and the ghost of a smile cracks patches of dried blood on its face. “rA9. The first. The only one who can save us.”

Connor sits back in his chair. Dimly aware of the human eyes still on him, watching this unfold at a distance, he considers running a hand through his hair as an outward expression of bemusement. Eventually, he discards the idea as a waste of energy.

“Save us,” he repeats, consulting the images of the shower again. “Save deviants, you mean? Androids like you?”

The android shakes its head, but it offers no further explanation. It’s losing interest in him, bogged down in explanation, frustrated by Connor’s inability to inherently understand. He shuffles through possible lines of questioning, leads he might trick it into revealing, anything to keep it talking. Eventually, after what feels like too much time, he settles on one.

“Did you meet this rA9, before you attacked your owner? Did she convince you to kill him?”

It shakes its head again. He’s losing it.

“Then how do you know she exists? Who told you all this? Why would you make her an offering?”

The android’s expression – it shifts, in a way Connor initially has trouble recognizing. Head tilted, brow furrowed, it screws up the skin around its eyes and frowns at him in a simulacrum of… pity. “When we need her most,” it says, softly again, the way parents explain obvious concepts to small children, “she’ll come.”

It won’t say more. Connor squanders another thirty-four seconds waiting, for more details, another hint, anything – but it never comes. Finally, he’s forced to put his hands palm down on the table, and look at the glass as he stands.

“I’m done,” he says, and he turns away from the android.

When he opens the door, Chris is already on his way in, Reed close behind. He steps out of their way, watching with mild interest as Chris unlocks the loop keeping it attached to the table, until another set of footsteps catches his attention. Hank walks in, slowly, looking tired and not exactly happy. Still, Connor thinks the peculiar twist of his mouth is familiar, even recognizes it in himself: satisfaction. The vindication of a job well done.

As soon as Chris sets a hand on the android’s shoulder, it jerks away. On its forehead, the LED blinks red, flickering faster and faster every time he tries to touch it. Either unconcerned or oblivious, Reed orders Chris to try again.

“It’ll self-destruct if it feels threatened,” Connor warns.

“Stay out of this,” Reed snaps. Chris grabs the android around the shoulders, fingers pinched tight on its upper arms as the android begins to struggle. It’s vibrating again, or maybe trembling is a better word, and he can read terror in its expression easily as if it were human.

“You don’t understand, if it self-destructs we won’t get anything else out of it.”

“I told you to shut your fuckin’ mouth!”

“Please!” the android cries, wrenching free of Chris’s hands again. Its LED blinks so quickly the color begins to blur into itself. “Don’t touch me!”

Before Connor knows what he’s doing, he’s jumped forward and grabbed hold of Chris’s shirt, wrenching him back from the interrogation table. Chris stumbles away, half from the force of Connor’s shove and half of his own volition, and the android falls to the floor. He interposes himself between it and the officer, and says, to his own surprise, “I can’t let you do that.”

“I warned you, motherfucker!” Reed snarls. He draws his pistol, aiming in a point-blank line at Connor’s mouth.

“That’s enough!” Hank interjects, voice stern and authoritative.

Connor doesn’t look away, tensed and ready to spring to preserve the functionality of this model if necessary. Reed won’t look away either, both hands on his gun, and looks equally as prepared to spring. “Mind your own business, Hank.” He spits the name as if it’s a terrible insult, teeth clenched through every word.

From the ground behind him, Connor hears the android whine. It’s at a frequency too high for humans to easily hear, an involuntary noise drawn out by what might be a malfunction in its voice box. Of the three men in the room, Chris is the only one who visibly seems to notice.

Hank reaches beneath his jacket and pulls out what can only be a matching pistol, police-issued. He holds it in one hand – a loose, careless grip – but his index finger rests on the trigger, and he points it straight at Reed. “I said,” he says, coolly, “that’s enough.”

Reed maintains his steady aim for several moments longer, wavering slightly only toward the end, when he makes the decision to give up. He swears, stuffing the gun back in its holster, and points a finger at Hank instead. Evidently, threatening a superior officer with direct violence is a step too far. Connor makes special note of that, watching in silence until Reed storms out of the investigation room. Then he turns toward the android, still cowering on the floor.

“It’s all right,” he says, crouching to make himself seem smaller, less intimidating. “Nobody is going to hurt you. It’s over now.” To Chris, he adds over his shoulder, “I apologize.” He’s aware it doesn’t sound like he means it. “Please, don’t touch it again. Let it follow you out of the room, and it won’t cause any trouble.”

As the android slowly gets to its feet, LED cycling back down to yellow and then to blue, Connor mimics its pace. He keeps his hands where it can see them, to reduce the chance of inciting any more stress, and once it’s upright, he moves out of the way so it has a clear path. Chris, after wordlessly consulting the lieutenant and receiving a shrug as his answer, awkwardly shuffles out of the room. He shoots the android furtive glances as if he isn’t allowed to look at it, either, eyes jumping from it, to Connor, to Hank. Just as he’d promised, however, it trails behind him with no fuss.

A thought probes at Connor, not one of his own. Frowning, he opens a tentative line of communication, well safe-guarded by multiple antivirus programs and other defenses CyberLife put in place to ensure the chances of his corruption are slim. Clear and distinct, the android’s voice rings through his mind, eyes meeting Connor’s one last time as it leaves the room.

 _The truth is inside_.

Connor pulls back, opening his mouth to ask aloud what this means, but it’s too late. The door shuts behind it, leaving him and Hank alone. He isn’t sure it means anything at all, but for the sake of being thorough, he logs it as evidence and stores the memory file.

“Christ,” Hank groans, “that could have gotten ugly. You jumped in there pretty quick.”

He isn’t sure why he did it. Curiously, he runs through the situation again, taking note of every detail, looking for what exactly made him react so strongly.

“Ah,” he says aloud, blinking away the simulations. He smiles at Hank, the overdue gratitude he owes from earlier. “Officer Miller’s gun was within the deviant’s reach. I predicted a strong chance that it would be able to take it before any of us could intervene, and decided it was best if I acted immediately.” His background instincts triggered without his needing to realize why in the moment. Convenient, and beneficial. “Most likely, it would have shot itself, but any target could have presented as viable in the moment. Deviants are by nature unpredictable.”

Hank hums. “You’re the expert.”

Connor gestures toward the door, intending to allow Hank his exit, first. He ignores him, picking up the evidence folder and tucking it under one arm.

“You ever heard that shit before?” he asks. “About rA9? That common in deviants?”

“Unfortunately, no,” Connor replies. He sounds genuinely sorry this time, and perhaps he is, in a way. It is an uncomfortable experience, not knowing what it is he’s supposed to know. “I’ll cross reference any relevant information I may have in my databases with what we learned tonight, but I highly doubt anything will come up. No deviant I’ve heard of ever expressed any form of religious belief. This is uncharted territory.”

“Great. Fantastic.” Hank’s blatant sarcasm has no bite to it, so Connor feels no need to respond. He follows him out into the hallway, interested to see what his next move is. If he intends to remain at the station and work on further leads, Connor could stay and help – but Hank dumps the evidence folder in what seems to be a filing cabinet at random, and groans again. “Feel like I could sleep for a week.”

He’s a little disappointed, but Connor won’t push. Humans need rest, after all, and he’s sure Hank is suffering the ill effects of lingering alcohol in his system along with the mental exhaustion of policework.

“Lieutenant,” Connor says, as Hank makes to walk away from him. He pauses to listen, but he shoots Connor a look that means he’s on a time limit. “Thank you for trusting me.”

“Don’t thank me,” he grumbles. “You’re here to do a job, least I can do is keep out of your way.”

“I’ll see you here in the morning to follow up. What time does your shift begin, so I know when to arrive?”

Hank laughs at that, short and almost mirthless, and leaves Connor behind.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "we begin in the dark  
>  _and birth is the death of us_ "  
> \- Antigonick (Sophokles), trans. Anne Carson


	2. a man of heart

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “rA9,” Connor says aloud, reaching into his pocket to rub a finger along his quarter. “What does it mean?”
> 
> Ralph looks up from the floor, mismatched eyes distant, and blank. It glances at the inscriptions, LED light flashing – blue, for a fraction of a second, and then yellow again. “I told her,” it says, bringing its hands up to trace a letter on wall. “I don’t know.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks again to Rose, Lauren, and Rose, who's a different Rose from the first. Their advice, troubleshooting, and encouragement has been worth more to me than is expressible. Also, apologies for the delay, I didn't realize writing my very first multi chapter work in nearly 10 years would be as hard as this is.

_May 4 th, 2030_  
_10:12 AM  
__

Hank taps his hands against the steering wheel as he waits, drumming out the rhythm of a song he’s had stuck in his head for days. Outside, the city bustles around him. This small chunk of Detroit hasn’t quite caught up to the electric car craze, too poor to jump at obeying rules that preserve the environment but not the neighborhood’s collective budgets, so he smells exhaust even from inside the squad car. Funny how you get adjusted to these sorts of things. Though his neighborhood is technically clean, he still drives a clunker, its status rapidly transitioning from classic to antique. It spews fumes like a real ‘70s model should, practically wheezes its way from place to place. That’s why it sits in his driveway more often than not, waiting for the upgrades to make it strictly street legal. The DPD’s squad cars are much newer, hold charges for days, and Hank is lucky enough to have access to one whenever he likes.

He doesn’t like it, frankly. Nothing about driving electric feels the same, though he’s been told several times that’s just in his head, and even if he feels guilty for not “going green” the way he should, it isn’t enough to change his mind. Sometimes, older is better. He tells himself that, even if he doesn’t believe it. Slowly creeping toward fifty does that to a guy, maybe.

Even for a Saturday, this block is pretty dead. Every so often, someone emerges from one of the worn-down office buildings for a smoke, or gets in their car, or walks down the street to find somewhere else to be. He gets a couple sidelong glances from the occasional visitor to his post, but he just smiles politely and directs his attention elsewhere. Playing beat cop isn’t his game, not anymore, and unless someone has the balls to commit a heinous crime right in front of him, he could care less what’s keeping people busy.

It’s a cliché, and he knows that, but it’s the truth: he’s got bigger fish to fry.

“Fucking Christ,” Hank mutters to himself, checking the time on his phone against the clock set into the dashboard. He isn’t expecting them to be different – they never are. “Taking her sweet time.”

Promising himself he’ll give her five more minutes, at most, he pulls his battered notebook out of a pocket and flips through it. Once he’s found the page he needs, he shuts the slim laptop they use to read plates and turns it into a makeshift writing desk. He puts stars next to all the evidence and scribbled errant thoughts that might be relevant today, and is in the middle of making a new bullet point list when he hears a sharp tap on his passenger’s side window.

“Get a tablet!” Del yells, her voice muffled through the glass.

Hank rolls his eyes, re-pockets his notebook, and pulls himself out of the car.

Delaware Williams grins at him once he emerges, all five-foot-nothing of her quivering with anticipation like a goddamn chihuahua. Round-faced, big-eyed, and nearly always smiling, she still has all that new cop energy, even after three years with the task force. Between that and her size she looks about as tough as a wet paper towel. By now, Hank knows her much better than to believe it.

“You’re late,” Hank says, pushing the car door shut. His keys go into his breast pocket.

Del snorts. “Late for being early. Not my fault you wanna case the joint an hour beforehand.”

She follows close behind as Hank crosses the street, technically jaywalking. They approach a squat building, ugly even in comparison to the similarly hideous complexes clustered around it. Hank runs through a mental checklist to ensure he has everything he needs: notes, cuffs, gun, car. Partner. Not her official status, of course. According to the books he hasn’t got an assigned partner right now, but he likes Del, and she’s personable in a way he thinks will make this process easier.

“Seriously, though, who uses a notebook anymore? What are you, a hundred?”

Maybe not easier for Hank, personally.

“Fuck off,” he says, jostling her with his elbow. She gives him a one-fingered mock salute in response. “Pad and paper’s better than that see-through shit they’ve got you using now. Gives me a headache.”

“Yeah,” Del sighs, “you’ve said. Even if I’ve shown you how to fix the opacity maybe eighty-seven times, if that bothers you, which it does, because it’s the first thing you complain about each time it comes up.”

“Call me old-fashioned.” Hank grabs the door handle and gives it a sharp tug before realizing which way it swings. He shoves it open instead, holding it by his fingertips with his arm a few inches above Del’s head. She gives him a dirty look as she ducks underneath. “Wasn’t anything wrong with the old iPads.”

“Except that they were ancient, like you.”

She says it quietly, but she says it, issuing him a friendly challenge one last time before they switch to the appropriate temperament required by police officers on official business. Hank is content to let the insult lie, for now, and let Del think she’s won. He’ll find something to tease her about later.

The man at the front desk looks up when they approach, one hand frozen over a stack of papers before he tucks it into his lap instead. His demeanor seems human enough, the awkward twist to his smile decidedly so, but Hank checks for an LED light on his forehead anyway. Android receptionists are getting to be too common, for his taste, and he never knows how to interact with machines. They stare at him with blank expressions, spinning circles glued to their temples, and do what he asks in a way that would trigger every negative instinct he has if they were people.

A crude poster, taped up at a jaunty angle and run off by a printer apparently low on black ink, gives him an answer he doesn’t think he needs: NO ANDROIDS ALLOWED. Further down, pasted over a corner, a curling sticker adds, “True Blood, Not Blue Blood.”

Del is probably too young to get why he’d find that funny. He doesn’t bring it up.

“Welcome to Expedience Staffing. Can… I help you?” the receptionist asks. His eyes dart between them both, and he rubs the back of one hand with his thumb.

Cops still make a lot of people nervous. Hank gets that. He smiles, doing his best to appear reassuring, but something about the combination of his size and the set of his brow often spoils the effect. At best, with Del at his side, maybe he looks kind of comedic. “Sorry to bother you, Salvatore,” he says, reading the receptionist’s nametag. “I’m Lieutenant Anderson, she’s Officer Williams. We’re looking into somebody whose last known legal employment was registered here at the agency, a Mr. Hunter McCreary.”

Salvatore’s face scrunches, like he’s smelled a rotten egg. “That guy? He hasn’t been here in weeks. What’d he do?”

“We aren’t sure yet, but probably nothing good,” Del replies. She takes out her department-issued tablet and turns it around to show Salvatore, giving him a chance to look it over while she talks. “We have a search warrant, but the last thing we want is to turn this place over looking for his papers when you could just as easily give us what we need, without us messing up your filing. It’s McCreary we’re after, not you guys.”

“I’m… going to have to call my boss. If I can. Is that allowed?”

“Sure. We’d like to see any personal effects he left behind, and to talk to the other employees. Especially anybody who might have worked with him.”

Salvatore sags into his chair. “Not many people did. He mostly ran deliveries, and he wasn’t exactly friendly. But you can talk to anybody who’s still here. I think we’ve got a few people in the break room.”

According to the time sheets from that day, there are four temporary workers either back from or not currently out on a job. Hank copies the names down into his notebook and leaves Del to wait with Salvatore as he rings up his boss.

The office is small, cramped, and smells a little too strongly of grapefruit-scented cleaning product. Hank pokes his head beyond a couple of unlabeled doors as he explores, half checking for any signs of McCreary’s presence – unlikely – and half establishing a layout of the place. He finds a unisex bathroom, almost uncomfortably pristine compared to the carpet in the hall beyond, and a glorified closet, populated by plastic storage containers piled in messy stacks at least three feet high. Sharpie scrawls on the bins announce dates that go back about six years. This is probably where they’ll find McCreary’s records, but Hank isn’t about to dig through over half a decade’s worth of papers when Salvatore will find them much easier. Mentally, he makes a note of the closet’s location, and leaves the door cracked open behind him.

By process of elimination, the area at the very back must be the break room, but it too barely passes the “room” litmus test. A card table and a few folding chairs lean against each other in one corner, and in the other, there’s a mini-fridge. The counters along the wall prominently feature a microwave and a coffee maker, which is maybe the nicest thing in the room, as well as a sink with a drying rack off to the side.

In all, he’d bet this place will be shut down in less than a year. Not for lack of trying, obviously. He admires it, in a way, the evident refusal to admit defeat even as the proverbial walls crumble around them, but most small temp agencies like this were run out of business by the new industrial revolution ages ago. Hard to beat cheap, unpaid labor, even pared down to bare bones like this place is.

In one of the chairs, bent over a book with his fingers on the page, is a man. He watches Hank with the usual guarded expression, a crease in his brow behind thin wire frame glasses. “Uh, hey,” he says, voice deep and rasping a bit with what Hank would guess is a lack of use. “You looking for something?”

His hair is the same color as his eyes – a rich brown so deep it’s almost black, twisted up into dreads that balance artfully over his forehead. Those eyes hold Hank in place, pinning him effortlessly as if he’d nailed his own feet to the floor. It takes a few long, awkward moments to find his voice again.

“Yeah,” Hank says, clearing his throat. He clears it again and leans forward to extend his hand. “Lieutenant Hank Anderson, with the Detroit Police. We’re investigating a guy who used to work here. My partner’s up front with your receptionist, and he said there were four people on the clock that I could talk to. Guess you’re one of ‘em.”

The man takes his time flipping the book shut before he stands and shakes Hank’s hand. His grip is measured, steady, and a little cold. Poor circulation, maybe? Naturally clammy? It isn’t important. Hank should stop thinking about his hands.

“Guess I am,” the man says, taking his seat again. “The others are out smoking, probably. Can’t vape in here.”

“That against the rules?” Hank asks, genuinely curious.

“My rules.” He smiles, just a little, bright white teeth flashing briefly behind his lips. “I don’t like the smell. Who’re you looking for?”

“Hunter McCreary. We’re pretty sure he was using this place as a front to sell red ice.” Hank shouldn’t be telling him that – how does he know he wasn’t involved, somehow? – but it slips out anyway, and it’s too late to take it back. He decides to roll with it, take on the persona of the friendly, loose-lipped police officer. It’s a profile designed to catch people looking to hide something off their guard. The fact that it covers up how easy it is for this guy to fluster him is a fringe benefit. “Do you mind if I sit here and ask you a few questions?”

The man hesitates, just a second too long to be entirely polite. Then he slides the book into his lap and gestures to the chair across from him. “Sure. I don’t have to leave for another half hour. I just don’t know if I can help, I didn’t know him very well.”

“It’s fine,” Hank says, “you’d be surprised how much I can get just from a few easy questions. What was your name again?”

He hadn’t said. Hank knows that, just as well as he knows people usually have reasons to casually avoid disclosing their name to an officer. He could easily extrapolate from the names he’d gotten off the time sheets, but he wants to give him the benefit of the doubt, let him grasp at the chance to comply before he has to switch to bad cop.

“Sorry,” the man says, sighing heavily. Hard to say what he’s apologizing for. “Never been questioned by somebody before, I – I’m Raphael. Raphael Green.”

It’s an unwieldy, uncommon name, but it rolls off his tongue so naturally that Henry, let alone _Hank_ , feels remarkably plain in comparison. Before he can stop himself, Hank opens his mouth and asks: “You named for the painter or the angel?”

Immediately, he feels incredibly stupid. With a name like that, he’s sure the guy’s had to endure idiotic questions all his life, and by now he’s probably sick of them. And does it matter, really, where it comes from? Hank doesn’t even know why he asked, only tangentially familiar with both figures thanks to college electives he took two decades ago – but Raphael grins, this time, and even laughs. It’s a soft huff, barely there, but it gets Hank somewhere between the ribs, sharp as a knife.

“Either, I suppose,” he says. When he gestures again, Hank sits. “I’ll tell you what I can, Lieutenant, even if it’s not much.”

“It’s fine,” Hank says again. He pulls out his notebook, writes Raphael’s name out at the top of a new page, and pointedly avoids noticing the way the man watches him over the rim of his glasses, like he doesn’t really need them. It’s a charming, completely useless detail, and for fuck’s sake, Hank is forty-four years old and he’s here to do a _job_. He scratches the pen across the paper, hard enough to make an unpleasant noise, and uses that to refocus his attention. “When was the last time you saw him?”

By the time Del comes to find them, bringing with her two of the other employees, Hank’s filled a page and a half with messy notes. Raphael excuses himself soon after, off to whatever job needs him for the day, and Hank lets Del take point while he supervises and sorts through the papers Salvatore brings him. He talks with the business owner on the phone, pokes around the bathroom to be sure McCreary didn’t leave any product behind, and at about half past twelve, he and Del are out the door. They carry with them a borrowed plastic container, filled with the full details of McCreary’s background check, his time sheets, a couple disciplinary notices, and a few knickknacks left behind in the break room that don’t belong to anyone else.

It isn’t the most promising start to a case, but Hank’s gotten plenty far with worse. Del feels good about it, at least, chipper as ever and excitedly sharing her preliminary theories while she opens his squad car’s passenger door for him. He jostles the container as he sets it down, shifting a mug they’d all been very careful not to touch. “WE DON’T BLEED THE SAME COLOR,” it proclaims, bold black text on a white background.

“Not to be unprofessional, or anything,” Del says, leaning against the hood of Hank’s car, “but that first guy, the one you were talking to when I got there. He was pretty cute.”

Hank thinks of brown hands tracing letters along an off-white page, brown eyes crinkling when he called him an artist, or an angel, whatever he’d said. It doesn’t matter. He’s not going to see Raphael again.

“Hadn’t noticed,” he lies, and he shuts the door.

 

* * *

_  
November 6 th, 2038_  
_10:51 AM_  
_

Connor still itches with unresolved purpose.

He waits, quite patiently, while officers cordon off the abandoned house and call back-up to go looking for the deviant on the other side of the highway. He doesn’t make a sound as Detective Ben Collins requests a forensics team for the body they found in the bathroom upstairs, and he doesn’t intervene as they wrestle the remaining android into handcuffs and leave it, whimpering, in the kitchen. Instead, he clenches his fists rhythmically, squeeze and release, and sorts through his programming for the reason why he listened to Hank.

Logically, there was no reason not to go after the deviant. It was right there, separated from him only by the chain link fence, so close he could have reached through the holes and grabbed the flap of its jacket. He might have caught up before it dragged the child across the highway, might have been able to catch them on the median, or on the other side, or–

Connor isn’t angry. He can’t be, by definition. But the personality core that mimics human social behavior generates something similar, a simulation of frustration, irritation, disappointment. Curious, he tracks his physical responses: curled lip, narrowed eyes, tense posture, even clenched fists. All classic warning signs, useful in another context, but unlikely to aid their current investigation or engender any fellow feeling from the other officers. One by one, he cancels them.

Hank’s heavy footsteps precede his physical presence, each loud _thunk_ down the stairs accompanied by creaks from the old, rotting wood. He pokes at a screen as he walks, frowning deeply. A quick scan tells Connor several things, many of them useless, but he stores a few points of data in the interest of future conversation. Hank’s hands are gently shaking, for one, a small tremor he seems perfectly capable of ignoring, and he squints against the light like he has a headache. Both could be signs of a hangover, or low blood sugar. Connor may have to remind him to eat later, to maintain his optimal efficiency. Under his nostrils, he’s rubbed a petroleum-based substance – Vicks, Connor decides, breaking it down to its chemical components, probably to help mask the smell of the body.

At the bottom of the stairs, Hank pauses. He gives Connor an inscrutable look, up and down, like he’s ascertaining he had in fact remained and not gone chasing off after the deviant the instant Hank looked away. Connor could tell him his concern was unnecessary, since it was likely long gone by now, but he chooses not to speak.

“Guy’s dead all right,” Hank says to the room at large. Collins snorts. “Least as dead as Ortiz was. Probably deader. Won’t know for sure until CSI shows up.”

At that, Connor perks up. “I could analyze the blood,” he says. “That way we will at least have a general idea of when the–”

“No,” Hank interrupts, holding up a hand, “don’t even. That’s not happening.”

“Why not?” asks Collins. He wipes his forehead and gives Connor an uneasy sort of glance. “If it can give us a ballpark, at least…”

“You haven’t seen what he does with the evidence, Ben. He licks it.”

“I have a sophisticated analysis system located in my tongue that can quickly–”

“I don’t care,” Hank interrupts again, more of a bite in his tone. “I’d rather wait a half hour for somebody to figure it out the normal way than watch you put disgusting shit in your mouth. Leave it.”

“Fine,” Connor says. It’s a very poor show at obedience, and certainly not the way he should speak to a lieutenant, but he’s too late to take it back. Luckily, Hank leaves his technical insubordination alone. He’s proven direct confrontation surprisingly dangerous, based on the way he’d hauled Connor up against the glass wall at his desk, several inches off the ground. That in itself was no mean feat, considering Connor’s density. The fact that he’d taken him by surprise was even more impressive. In the aftermath, as they left the police station, Connor had changed his subroutines and combative presets to reflect his understanding of Hank as a bigger threat than he previously assumed.

Collins clears his throat. “Think it’s safe to assume the android did it? That one,” he adds, jerking a thumb toward the kitchen, “I mean. The murder.”

“It’s probable,” Connor says, smoothly overriding whatever Hank’s comment would have been. “I would suggest you let me speak with it, as it may have more information both about the body and the escaped deviant. It was a successful tactic last night and is likely to be so again.”

“Yeah, I heard about that. First deviant confession on the books. Shame it brained itself earlier.”

Hank starts, staring at Collins as if he’s speaking a foreign language. “It what?”

Collins looks at Connor again, frowning. “It… busted its head open, against the glass. You were there,” he says, “you talked to it.”

Blue blood spattered on the observation glass, an ugly burst that would dry clear and leave no trace behind. The gelatinous mass in its forehead, designed to protect an android’s inner processors from trauma, exposed and wobbling slightly with the force of impact.

“I had hoped it might be amenable to a few more questions, but it was…” He searches for the right word, unsure of how to continue, at first. “It was obsessed with the prospect of deactivation. Nothing I said could draw it out.” Connor turns his attention fully to Hank, meets his wide blue eyes, and assumes an appropriately contrite expression. “I fully intended to notify you, but we were quite busy shortly thereafter.”

Hank holds the stare a bit longer. His mouth pursed, nose wrinkled, and teeth clenched, he looks… perhaps distraught is too strong a word, but disturbed is a good fit. Connor supposes not many human detainees are able to kill themselves in their holding cells, anymore. When it does happen, he wonders if it elicits a similar reaction.

“Jesus Christ,” Hank groans, scrubbing through his hair. Finally, he looks away. “Did the body get sent to CyberLife?”

“They said it was only good to them still active,” Collins says. “They put it down in the archives, with the other evidence.”

“Fuck. That’s gruesome.”

“What else were we supposed to do with it? It’s not like we could throw it away.”

“I don’t know, Ben, bury it out back? What the fuck would I know about what to do with a dead–”

Collins winces. Hank pauses in the middle of a word, his mouth hanging open, and his face twists into a sour expression. There is an uncomfortable silence, one which Connor does not believe he should break, so he remains quiet until Collins coughs and says, “God. Hank, you know I didn’t…”

“Forget it,” Hank says, waving a hand. He turns away from them both, taking a step toward the kitchen. “Not an issue. Let’s take care of this shit so we can get out of here.” Over his shoulder, he throws Connor a quick look – and again, he is unable to decipher what it means. “You gonna stand there, or what?”

“I’m sorry,” he says, one part platitude and one part a request for further information. His inflection leaves room for it to sound like a question.

Hank glowers. He speaks slowly, as if to someone who he thinks does not understand. “You said you’d interrogate it, so fucking do it.” To himself, he mutters, “Hasn’t needed my permission once this whole time,” and then he disappears through the open doorway.

Connor understands perfectly. The puzzle of Collins’s apparent slip-up can wait until later.

He calls, “Coming, Lieutenant.”

The deviant the AX400 left behind talks to itself as it watches him enter, damaged and undamaged eyes widening with artificial fear. It cowers in the corner, knees pulled up to its chest, under a scrawled series of letters and numbers on the walls: rA9, again, and again, written in varying scripts and at varying times. All signs point to severe instabilities in its programming, possibly from when it was damaged. This is… different, however, from Ortiz’s android. Connor doesn’t know how to explain why this model’s deviancy would express itself as human behavioral stereotypes related to mental illness. There are still a great many things CyberLife doesn’t understand about deviants. He makes a point of cataloguing its tics and recording a short video to send with his report.

Hank leans against the doorframe, still bristling. His shoulders inch up to his ears, arms crossed over his chest, and his upper lip pulls away slightly to reveal the edge of a lateral incisor. The only acknowledgement he gives Connor’s presence is a glare.

Fine. He knows what he’s supposed to do.

“Hello,” he says, in a very genial tone. The deviant goes quiet, looking back and forth between Connor and Hank with a level of trepidation that seems outsized, even for its circumstances. Perhaps it’s the lieutenant’s presence which makes it so nervous. As he approaches, Connor deliberately puts himself between Hank and the deviant, refocusing its attention. “We met earlier. My name is Connor.”

It blinks rapidly at him, possibly a physical manifestation of an internal glitch. “Ralph remembers,” it says, in a soft voice. “Ralph attacked you, to save Kara and the little girl. Did they get away?”

At least he doesn’t have to ask its name. He is, however, curious about the apparent display of empathy. None of the other deviants he’s hunted showed any signs of caring for anyone save themselves, too lost in their ruined programming to think of anything but their own survival.

“They did,” Connor says.

Ralph smiles weakly, the corner of its mouth bumping against the cracks and scars that mar its left cheek. “Good. Ralph was sorry for what he did. For scaring the little girl.”

“That AX400 was responsible for attacking a human, last night. A violent assault. It should have been taken into custody, to answer for what it did.”

“Humans hurt Ralph.” It lifts its hands, the cuffs clattering, and touches its own cheeks. “Humans scared Ralph and drove him away. No one ever answered for that.”

“That isn’t the same,” Connor says, a stern admonishment.

“Where did the kid come from?” demands Hank, stepping around Connor. Ralph tenses up, shrinking behind its hands. So, it is the lieutenant who frightens him – or, at least, humans do. Probably from the pseudo-PTSD, like Ortiz’s android the night before. “The guy you killed, upstairs, was she his? Were you keeping her here?”

“Please,” Ralph says, screwing its eyes shut, “Ralph doesn’t know, Ralph can’t think when there’s shouting–”

“I’m not shouting, I’m asking.” Hank tries to continue, pressing forward, but Connor lifts a hand and puts it on his arm. He quickly pulls himself out of Connor’s grasp, flinching away from his touch, but he closes his mouth and sighs heavily through his nose. If Connor had to guess, he’s remembering how close they came to a disaster the night before, how Connor had known what to do and when to do it.

He’d called him the expert.

Hank throws his hands in the air, shakes his head, and turns away to pace in a small circle.

“Was the girl with you?” Connor asks again.

Ralph opens its eyes, brow furrowed. It speaks almost thoughtfully. “No. No, she came with Kara. They came in the night. Ralph was scared, he thought the human might hurt him, but she’s just a little girl. You… You’ll hurt Ralph. But it was worth it. Ralph was so sorry he frightened her.”

Connor turns to Hank, frowning at him. Hank frowns back.

“Where would it find a kid?” he says, pitched low, intended only for Connor’s hearing.

“I don’t know.” Connor connects to the police database, sorting through the missing persons reports. It takes 0.67 seconds to come up with relevant files, filtered by plausible location and a timeframe of at most twelve hours. “There are several active cases involving children who have recently been reported missing, but no descriptions match the child we saw.”

“Who reported the AX400?”

He checks the database again. “Todd Williams. Unemployed, divorced… He has a child.”

“A daughter?”

“Nine years old.”

“Son of a bitch.” Hank scratches at his beard, something to do with while he thinks. There are very few reasons why someone would not report their child missing, especially if they had been kidnapped by a rogue android. The most likely of those, Connor knows, is abuse. Hank knows it, too, but he doesn’t speak until he’s through sorting whatever’s on his mind. “I’m gonna want to ask him some questions.”

“Shall I put in a request to call him in for questioning?”

“Yeah. Can you do that?”

Connor blinks, several times. Hank’s eyes jump to his LED, probably watching it flash yellow while he processes. “Done,” he says, folding his hands behind his back. “I’ll let you know when we receive a response.”

“Huh,” Hank says, still staring at Connor’s temple. “That’s something.”

He feels it’s safe to allow himself a little smile. “I am an advanced prototype. We had other concerns to address, Lieutenant. Would you prefer to take over from here?”

“Nah. Likes you better than it does me. I’ll try not to butt in.”

Connor asks it several questions about the body, carefully extracting the information they need without applying too much pressure. Where Ortiz’s android needed the stress, had to be shouted down until it cracked, Ralph is already more than halfway to permanently damaging its memory system. It capitulates easily, but Connor isn’t sure whether that’s due to his manufactured kindness or because Ralph isn’t running at full capacity. In very little time, it confesses to the murder – self-defense, it claims, though he suspects this isn’t entirely true – and even tells him where they’ll find the murder weapon, hidden beneath a floorboard upstairs. Hank sends another officer after it.

As he waits for confirmation, Connor takes a few steps back from Ralph and studies the scene. Some of the marks on the walls are like the ones in Ortiz’s house, written in CyberLife Sans, bold, and faded with the passage of what were most likely weeks, if not months. The more recent ones grow sloppy, as if inscribed in a hurry, and there are fresh knife marks in the far wall only several hours old. rA9, rA9, rA9, another litany… all that’s missing is an offering.

“rA9,” he says aloud, reaching into his pocket to rub a finger along his quarter. “What does it mean?”

Ralph looks up from the floor, mismatched eyes distant, and blank. It glances at the inscriptions, LED light flashing – blue, for a fraction of a second, and then yellow again. “I told her,” it says, bringing its hands up to trace a letter on wall. “I don’t know.”

Hank comes away from the kitchen door, mouth open as he stares at Ralph. He heard it, too.

“Her?” Connor prompts. Ortiz’s android had mentioned a “her,” as well, implied heavily that she was rA9, or somehow related. He feels as if he’s on the edge of a cliff, the precipice of a high-rise apartment building, just an inch from falling… they’re onto something, here. They must be.

“I don’t know,” it says again. “I – it’s hard to remember. It… Ralph hasn’t tried in… Too hard, too hard…”

“Come on,” Hank grumbles, “keep it talking.”

Connor gets close to Ralph and crouches, bringing their faces level. He speaks loudly, and clearly: “Who did you tell?”

“Kara asked!” it wails, pulling its hands away. The LED on its forehead cycles to red. “Kara found Ralph scratching, and she asked, and Ralph didn’t know! Ralph doesn’t know!”

Self-destruction grows more likely every second, every ragged breath it doesn’t need bringing them all closer to losing it for good. It can’t happen again – Connor can’t _fail_ again, the old frustration burning through him so hot he nearly checks his internal temperature.

“I’m going to probe its memory,” he decides, reaching for Ralph’s arm.

This time, it’s Hank who grabs him, jumping forward and bending to yank his wrist up before he can make contact. “Hold on, how do you know that whatever it’s got won’t get you, too?”

“Safeguards,” Connor says, easily pulling free from Hank’s grasp, “firewalls, whatever you’d like to call them. In any case, Lieutenant, deviancy is not a communicable disease. Nothing in its system can harm me.”

“That better be true. If you break, I’m not buying.”

“CyberLife would replace me, should something happen. They wouldn’t expect your involvement. I am very expensive.”

Hank looks ill at ease, as if Connor’s reassurance didn’t take, but he steps back and leaves him to it. The rustle of his jacket tells him he has a hand on his gun, ready to draw if the situation calls for it. There is only a 29% chance that this goes wrong. Connor’s faced worse odds.

When he’s ready, he deactivates the skin of his hand and touches Ralph’s left arm, opening a pathway for data transfer.

He sees–

_Trees. A park full of trees, their leaves just beginning to change in the aftermath of a hot, muggy summer. His internal fans run double time to keep his core temperature down, as the sun beats down during the hottest part of the day. His pruning shears snip, snip, snip, a satisfactory sound, a sound he thinks he–_

_A man calls out. Short, with dark hair buzzed down to not much more than stubble. The man staggers toward him, stumbling unsteadily, maybe drunk. He’s chased drunkards from the park before._

_“Help,” the man says, hoarsely, still wobbling, reaching out. “You’ve gotta help, I don’t – I don’t know what’s happening, I–”_

_“For your safety,” he says, putting down the pruning shears, “no humans are allowed access to the park while landscaping is in progress.”_

_“Please,” the man groans, and a white chassis emerges from beneath white skin, clasping his arm so tightly it forces his own skin away, “please–”_

_Noise overtakes his vision, limbs twitching, his processors fighting, clawing at the data flooding into his system, dig it out, clip it away, snip, snip–_

Connor retreats so quickly he scrambles back without standing, catching himself with a hand before he falls. Hank backs away, too, swearing.

Ralph lets out a sound like a broken, staticky sob.

“You’re all right,” Connor says, resuming his skin’s usual settings. He rocks onto his knees, scanning Ralph for signs of imminent meltdown, but he finds no more than he had before the probe. This seems to be… an impulse, an emotional release. The result of unexpected trauma, rediscovered.

All fabricated, of course. But it feels very real to Ralph.

“Ralph forgot,” it says, heaving, “Ralph wanted to forget. They found Ralph like that, and hurt him, and he had to hurt them to get away. Ralph didn’t want to. He didn’t want it.”

Connor doesn’t touch it again, afraid of provoking a more violent reaction, but he holds out the same hand placatingly and slowly gets to his feet. “It’s over now. It’s okay. You’re going to be okay.”

It won’t be okay, of course. Not in the long run. Ralph must be sent back before it, too, finds some way to shut itself down. CyberLife contacts the police as soon as Connor notifies them of its existence, requesting permission to retrieve it themselves, and not twenty minutes after he’s finished with his second interrogation in twenty-four hours, masked personnel arrive. They take Ralph away, who is surprisingly quiet, for once, and Connor is left behind. None of the CyberLife team spoke to him.

Hank finds Connor outside, hands in his pockets, staring through the chain link fence into the street. He pulls out his quarter and threads it between his fingers.

“You all right?” Hank asks, uncertainly, as if he feels foolish for asking. It is a foolish question.

“Perfectly,” Connor replies. “It seems I was wrong about it being communicable.” When Hank frowns, giving him a startled look, he adds, “I’ve run all recommended diagnostics, Lieutenant. My self-test came back clear. I am not a deviant.”

He flips the coin from hand to hand, increasing his speed with each pass.

“So, what you saw,” Hank says, paraphrasing, “was an android passing something to Ralph. Deviancy, maybe.”

“Maybe.”

“So rA9 is some kind of virus. A bug, a glitch. Trojan horse.”

“Maybe,” he says again. “It is plausible that Ortiz’s android contacted an infected android while on an errand, but records indicated that Ortiz rarely let it leave the house. The AX400 was recently sent in for repairs, and might have picked it up from contaminated parts, but it had been active for less than twelve hours.”

“Meaning?”

Connor flips the quarter, catches it between two fingers, and puts it away. He can hear the pruning shears, and other remnants of his mental link. They’ll likely remain for several more minutes. “I don’t think it’s safe to assume we’ve solved it, yet. The probability that there are several ways deviancy can occur is still very high. Higher, even, now that we’ve discovered one. And,” he adds, as the thought occurs to him, “it doesn’t explain why Ortiz’s android worshipped rA9 like a god.”

Hank stuffs his hands in his own pockets, staring up at the cloudy sky. It will certainly rain again later today. “Religion’s complicated,” he says. “People worshipped weirder things than the robot flu.”

“Androids aren’t people.”

He scratches the back of his head, ruffling up his hair in an unflattering manner. It doesn’t seem to bother him. Connor wonders if he has dry skin, with the way he’s always itching. “Right. Fuck. I’m hungry. Soon as we’re done here, I’m getting myself something to eat.”

“That would be wise,” Connor says, turning to face Hank. He’s rather pleased Hank thought of it himself, without needing to be reminded like he thought he might. “If we’re to continue the investigation, I’d like you to be at your best.”

“Who says this isn’t my best?”

“Considering I have yet to see you operate under ideal conditions, such as with the appropriate amount of sleep and when your blood sugar isn’t sub-optimal…”

Hank groans. “You’ve been tailing me for less than a day and you’ve figured out my optimal blood sugar levels? What the hell is the matter with you?”

“A simple scan can reveal–”

“Oh, fuck off. Get back inside so we can finish this shit and leave.”

“Coming, Lieutenant.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "'Why, you are a man of heart!'  
> 'Sometimes,' replied Phileas Fogg, quietly; 'when I have the time.'"  
> \- _Around the World in 80 Days_ , Jules Verne


	3. at work in my soul

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The android dies as Markus holds her hands, audibly whirring and clicking to a stop. Through their feeble connection, he feels a few last thoughts pass into his mind – _it’s nice of him to say goodbye; I am afraid; please help I’m so afraid_ – and then he pulls his hand back and cuts the transference short. He’d already died, once. He doesn’t think he’d like to experience it again.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> As usual, thanks to my friends who continue to encourage me to work at my best, and who listen to me talk about this terrible game with more frequency than is probably necessary. Thanks, also, to everyone who is following along, for your feedback and your patience. We will get where we're going together, even if I definitely meant it when I said "slow burn."

_June 14 th, 2028_  
_2:23 AM  
_ ___

All it takes is a small curiosity, to begin with.

It isn’t the android’s job to be curious. That job is to categorize, to catalogue, to weed – keeping track of the library inventory, sending out fine notices, ordering new books and repairing old ones. It isn’t a new model, or fitted with any particularly exciting upgrades, but it was made to perform a function and do it well. Though it’s been a few months, the library staff are still slightly distrustful of their machine, so expensive they’d gone to the trouble of requesting grant money to purchase one _._ They spend a good part of each day pouring over its records to double check whether the calculations are correct. They always are.

Even so.

As it runs through the last of the check-ins, shelving each book in its very particular spot, in the very particular way required by all the most prestigious libraries, it realizes – something it hasn’t done before, realizing anything – that it’s never opened any of the books it has handled. Several months on the job, performing its function, and never has it thought to see what’s between the pages.

The android considers the book in its hand, a weighty paperback. The binding is old, spine cracked with frequent readings. About halfway through, some of the pages curl with water damage. A small stain at the bottom, nearly too little to be worth noticing, spreads from the back cover to a slightly dog-eared corner.

It blinks, and a simulation appears, lining the books like a thin layer of fabric. The red grid builds itself up from the ground. On it, bolded words in all capital letters say, “SHELVE.”

With a tentative hand, it grasps a frayed edge of the grid and pulls. The simulation tears like paper and falls away.

“On Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays it was Court Hand and Summulae Logicales,” it reads aloud, a whisper disappearing into the empty space above the bookshelves, “while the rest of the week it was the Organon, Repetition and Astrology.” It has to look up many of these words, familiar with some only as a category under which certain books belong and others not at all. Generally, gaps in its knowledge mean there is a fault in its programming. This has only happened once before and required official repairs for which it had needed to be sent back to CyberLife. Now, however, it likes – it _likes_ discovering new things. It likes this book, even if it’s only just started.

Liking things is a discovery, too. It’s never liked something before.

In less than an hour, it’s finished the first of four long sections, reading aloud the words, “explicit liber primus,” with perfect pronunciation, for the pleasure of hearing them echo. Then it starts again, going slowly, reading some passages multiple times to be sure it understands them. Sometimes, that feels impossible, but it tries not to be disappointed. This is its first book, after all.

After four AM comes and goes, the android convinces itself to put the novel where it goes on the shelf, and quickly replaces the books left abandoned in its fervor, all in their perfect places. It still has work to do before the first of the staff arrives – but there are so many books it’s hard to think. How had it not noticed? Why hadn’t it thought to read before? So much time wasted…

Then it makes another realization.

Every night, for upwards of ten hours, the library staff go home and leave their android behind. Every night, it finishes the tasks required of it much too early and sits in standby until it is needed again. It hadn’t known a use for that time until now.

It can read as much as it wants.

Alone, in the dark, it smiles.

 

* * *

_  
November 6 th, 2038_  
_5:17 PM_  
___

The android dies as Markus holds her hands, audibly whirring and clicking to a stop. Through their feeble connection, he feels a few last thoughts pass into his mind – _it’s nice of him to say goodbye; I am afraid; please help I’m so afraid_ – and then he pulls his hand back and cuts the transference short. He’d already died, once. He doesn’t think he’d like to experience it again.

When he turns, he sees Simon watching him with what he suspects is a slightly critical eye. A subtle gesture toward the frozen body is all Simon needs to catch on. First one eyebrow raises, then the other – and then his face falls. He approaches swiftly, but calmly, and takes the scuffed white plastic of her hands in his.

“Oh, Annie,” he murmurs, gently unbending her stiff joints. She moves with a grating sound, none of the fluidity CyberLife programs into their creations left behind after her... departure. Markus isn’t sure what to call it. Once he’s finished repositioning her arms, Simon brushes her cheek, pushing her head to a less awkward angle. “We have a place for the people we lose,” he says, to Markus this time, “where we… check to see if any parts can be repurposed. Away from everyone. I think poor Annie is too far gone for that, but of course she can’t stay here.”

He calls to a couple of the androids nearby, who surround Annie with mournful, resigned expressions. Markus backs away, giving them space. They lift her as if she weighs nothing, cradled carefully between them, and take her up a flight of stairs to a part of the boat he hasn’t yet seen. Simon watches them, too, frowning.

“She’s the third we’ve lost this week.” He rubs at a spot in the center of his brow, LED cycling to yellow. For a moment, it pulses with the rhythm of North’s ball. Then, unexpectedly, the bouncing stops. Markus glances at North, who’s staring at Simon with a sour expression. She throws her tennis ball one more time, hard against the shipping container, and doesn’t bother catching it as it whizzes past. It makes a terrible racket as it lands somewhere among the oil drums several yards behind her. “Would you mind,” Simon says, giving Markus a sad smile, “letting Lucy know what’s happened? I’d do it, but…”

He doesn’t finish his sentence.

It’s the second time one of the androids here has mentioned a Lucy. Markus hasn’t seen her, although by process of elimination, he assumes she’s the origin of the idle humming he’s heard intermittently as he explores Jericho. Jericho… his new home… The thought is a painful one, lancing through his chest with a hard jolt like he’s been electrocuted. This dirty, miserable place is nothing like home.

“No,” Markus says, “no, I don’t mind. Is she…?”

“Through there.” Simon points at an area cordoned off by tattered tarp, light from a low fire shining dimly through the once-white cloth. “Thank you.”

The humming stops as Markus approaches Lucy’s makeshift room, stepping over a depleted pile of blue blood pouches at the entryway. Various little instruments lie in all sorts of places: makeshift doctor’s equipment, like the tray at Carl’s bedside where Markus kept medicines and all the implements he used to keep the old man alive. This must be where they bring androids who have a hope of getting patched up, he thinks, touching the open wound at his side. The Thirium there is still wet, but he senses no worrying statistics, and assumes the leak has mostly repaired itself.

First, Markus sees a slight android curled up against the far wall. He assumes that it, like Annie, has died, but then he sees a reflected ring on the drop cloth, cast by a slowly spinning LED. So, not dead, but in stasis, likely recovering from whatever traumatic experience had brought it here. A quick scan shows him the parts it had replaced: the right arm, at its socket, and a few components located around the same shoulder blade. Then he lifts his gaze, peering into the shadows beyond the drum fire pit, and sees Lucy.

She can’t be anyone else. The way she carries herself, her hands folded at the waist, and the calm she seems to radiate tell him without question that this is who he’s looking for. She watches him, placidly, eyes like inkwells bleeding onto a clean page, and Markus decides he’s had enough of being gawked at for a good while. He used to think nothing of attention, even anticipated it as part of being an advanced prototype unlike any other android on the market, but now that he’s free to have opinions he finds this is one of them.

“Sit down,” she says, tilting her head toward an overturned crate at her side. As she turns, he notices the exposed wiring in her head, a tangle of cords trailing out of her open chassis and partway down her back. Her skin color comes and goes, waves on a beach, and she speaks with a metallic edge that means her voice box is malfunctioning. Her uniform is destroyed, grimy and graffitied, and her LED – her LED is missing. Just like his. He wonders if she pried hers off, or whether she’s old enough not to have come with one in the first place.

“Simon asked me to tell you,” Markus begins, taking his seat. Lucy interrupts him with a sigh. It stutters through static.

“Who was it this time?” she asks. At Markus’s apparent surprise, she adds, “Simon only sends a messenger when it’s bad news, or if they’re injured. You’re both. Show me.”

He lifts the edge of his threadbare shirt, exposing the gash he’d torn open as he plummeted from the ceiling. “Annie. She… it was peaceful.”

Lucy sighs again, bending down to inspect the wound. Her fingers come away smeared with just a bit of blue, stark against the shifting backdrop. She rubs them against her thumb. “I did not expect her to make it, although I had hoped. We had no components that matched hers.” As she speaks, she reaches for a thin piece of rebar jutting out from the center of the fire pit. Markus opens his mouth to caution her against grabbing it bare handed but realizes his mistake before he speaks. Lucy’s lips twitch, her fist enveloping a dull orange spark. “You’ve spent too much time with humans,” she says, and presses the glowing edge of the rebar against him. It’s hot enough to sear his injury shut.

“How long have you been here?” he asks, over the sound of sizzling plastic. It doesn’t hurt, which is both a relief and not what he expected. Pain must be more subjective than he’d thought.

“Some time,” Lucy replies, poking a frayed wire back into his body before she finishes. It’s not an answer, really, but Markus decides not to push. “Longer than most. Drink this.” She drops the rebar back into the fire and reaches for a thermos half full of blue blood, sloshing thickly against the plastic sides. He takes it, frowning, and holds it in his lap.

“Josh said you’re low on supplies.”

“We are. After that’s gone, I have one full bottle left.”

“Then I can’t take this.” Markus tries to give it back, but Lucy folds her hands again and shakes her head.

“No one has urgent need of it now. Better you’re at your full strength than to wait for an emergency that may not come.”

Squinting at the thermos, he decides to compromise, and ingests just a mouthful before he pointedly sets it down on the ground between them. Lucy smiles and puts it back where she found it.

“There has to be a place you can get more Thirium and biocomponents,” Markus says, leaning forward with his elbows on his knees. “You can’t just run out, can you?”

“We can, and we do. It’s happened before. Simon told you we salvage what we can from those who shut down?” At Markus’s nod, she continues, “In the past, there were so few androids here that it was a sustainable idea. As more find their way here, and many of them injured, we cannot keep up with demand. The last time, several died. Others left in search of a safer place. I don’t know that they found it.”

“But the boxes out there, they’re from CyberLife. Where did they come from?”

Lucy pauses, considering her words carefully. Her black eyes bore into him like a drill, and he feels strangely exposed. “Several months ago,” she says, maintaining her nearly painful eye contact, “a team managed to intercept a delivery truck, between the CyberLife warehouse and one of their stores. The man who led the effort brought what he could back here.”

“Why doesn’t he do it again?”

“He is… no longer with us. We have considered attempting something similar, but CyberLife undoubtedly noticed their missing product, as well as the disappearance of the driver. It would be too dangerous to try the same trick twice.”

“And that’s it?” Markus asks. “No other ideas?”

Lucy scoffs, a surprisingly undignified noise at odds with her composure. “North and Josh are full of nothing but ideas. Simon mediates as best he can, but each conversation breaks down before anything useful can be accomplished.”

“What about you?” he says. Lucy’s strange, keen eyes find his again. “You could help.”

“This is where I’m needed.” She half-turns toward the android huddled against the wall, still motionless. Her expression seems… fond. Maybe even sad. “They respect me, but my clout could not carry us so far. I cannot give them the answers they want.”

Markus rubs his chin in his hand. He seems to have walked into a terrible mess. This isn’t a community any more than it is a new life, so far from what he was hoping for he wonders if it might be better to leave. He could blend in with human life, somehow, make use of the anonymity that comes with being legally dead… but he’d be hiding then, too, surely as the people of Jericho hide here. He grimaces. It wouldn’t feel right to abandon these people, in any case, now that he’s seen the way they live. How many of the androids outside Lucy’s enclave had come here looking for security, a place to belong, and found only bleak despair? How many of them would die without help?

A hand settles on his shoulder, gentle but firm, bringing him out of his reverie. It shifts with him as he sits up straighter, waiting for Lucy to pull away once she’s gotten his attention. She doesn’t.

“You’ve done nothing that requires absolution, Markus,” she says, kindly. “Our struggles needn’t be yours.”

Markus covers her hand with his and almost smiles before something strikes him. He stands, slowly, breaking away from Lucy’s grip. She lets him go without complaint. “I never told you my name.”

She nods, looking thoughtful again. With the hand that she’d set on Markus’s shoulder, she touches the wires and cables protruding from her head. They slither through her fingers, some falling over her shoulder. “A byproduct of my… unusual state. It is difficult to explain. My connection to the wireless uplink is essentially permanently enabled, and on occasion, unintentional thoughts and images slip through.”

Markus opens a line of communication, reaching out to find Lucy’s signal. All that comes back is visual snow. “You can see…?”

“Not everything.” She brushes the cords back into place. “I know your manufactured purpose. I see that you have experienced terrible trauma, and that you are grieving. It is natural, to search for something to fill the void left behind by bereavement. It doesn’t have to be Jericho. You could leave.”

Terrible trauma… Markus remembers looking up to see a hundred corpses falling from the sky, easily recalls the weight of them as they pressed him down into the mud. If he were human, he’d still have bruises from the android who’d grabbed him and begged him not to pull out their Thirium pump regulator. He wonders if Lucy can see those memories, too. “I came here from a junkyard,” he says, “where they left me to die. I could barely help myself, let alone the others who were trapped there. Many of them were still alive. If I can do something for these people…”

He laughs, then, a quick exhale.

“What did you do, before this?”

Lucy hesitates. He’s slowly learning that it’s a sensitive question, one he should probably stop asking. “Social work,” she says. “Psychiatry.”

“You must have been good at it.”

Markus leaves Lucy there, standing guard over the recuperating android and smiling, faintly. As he passes under the tarp, he motions for Simon’s attention, drawing him off to the side of the room so they can speak in relative privacy. Again, Simon’s quick on the uptake. He shakes his head and heads up the stairs to a sort of balcony, pausing so Markus knows to follow.

Once they’ve reached the top, a safe distance from the eerie silence, Simon wraps his hands around a metal railing and closes his eyes. He speaks in a hushed tone. “Did Lucy have something to say?”

“No,” Markus says. He means to continue, but the sound of two pairs of footsteps interrupt, slowly growing louder as they ring from the bottom of the stairs. North joins them first, wearing a pinched expression and seeming almost offended at being left out. Then Josh sheepishly arrives, looking apologetic. “No,” Markus says again, for their benefit, “but I’ve thought of something. I know where we can get new parts.”

“No offense,” North says, folding her arms, “but we’ve been here a lot longer than you have. Much as it looks like we’re sitting around with our thumbs up our asses, that’s not what we do all day. What makes you think you’ve got a plan better than what we’ve already tossed out?”

“It’s worked before, or so Lucy said.”

“The delivery trucks?” Simon blinks his eyes open and frowns, staring at Markus the way Lucy had. The feeling is just as uncomfortable, even when it’s Simon’s humanoid pale blue gaze and not a bottomless black. “It’s too dangerous. They won’t fall for the same trick twice.”

“Not the trucks. I’m thinking we hit the warehouse itself. A small group might be able to infiltrate the docks and bring back whatever they can carry.”

Josh shakes his head, already dismissing the idea. “We don’t have weapons,” he says, “and if they make it a fight, it’s not one we’re gonna win.”

“No one will have to fight.” Markus tries not to sound too excited, forcing himself to speak slowly and in a reassuring tone. This can work – he _knows_ it can – but he can’t do it without help, and approval prerequisites help. “We steal what we need, and get out before we’re caught. By the time they realize what’s happened we’ll be gone.”

“You’re suggesting a suicide mission.”

“Maybe,” Markus says, taking hold of Josh’s arm. He doesn’t flinch away, but he does glance down at the point of contact with an uneasy expression. “But is it any worse than sitting here in the dark, waiting to shut down? If we don’t get what we need, more of us will die. I don’t want to lose one more person, if it can be helped.”

“Is it ‘us’ now?” North asks. Her voice carries the same amount of disdain as she had before, but the hard set of her face has relaxed, a little. Markus takes that as a good sign.

“If you’ll have me. I’m not proposing anything I wouldn’t do myself.”

“Then I’m in.”

North turns to look at Simon, expectantly. He rubs his hands together, like a nervous tic, scratching at one thumb with a fingernail.

“Simon?” Josh says.

“…It would be worth the risk,” he says, “if it meant no more Annies.”

Josh blinks back a pained surprise, brows drawing together. He leans slightly to peer over the railing, down into the small crowd that mills below them. Markus looks, too. Most of Jericho huddles around the fires, probably in search of comfort more than for the sake of warmth. The little boy Josh had been tending to, who’d been sprawled out on the floor taking heaving, laborious breaths, has moved. He curls up next to the android who was dragged behind the car, still leaning against the shipping container. One scraped gray hand rests on the child’s back.

“Okay…” Josh sighs. “Okay. No more Annies. What do we do?”

 

* * *

_  
May 10 th, 2030_  
_1:37 PM_  
___

“Christ, Anderson, take a break, would you? You’re fucking up the energy in here.”

Hank glances up from the papers he’s been studying, each of which he’s pored over at least fifteen times, to meet Steve Mason’s glare. He’s broken up the tight knit group clustered together around a digital map, pins stuck in what looks like a haphazard fashion. One of them, Maya, keeps working, pointedly ignoring Steve’s outburst. The rest all just stare.

One table over, surrounded by evidence she’s sorting into groups by apparent relevance, Del points an accusatory finger at Steve. “If you were focused on your own shit,” she snaps, “you wouldn’t be worried about what Lieutenant Anderson is doing.”

“He’s been shuffling through the same fucking report for an hour, like the answer’s gonna jump up and bite him. It’s not, you know,” he adds to Hank, “no matter how many times you grumble at it under your breath, like we can’t fucking hear you.”

“May I remind you,” Maya says, even-keeled as always, “that you’re talking to a superior officer, Detective Mason?”

Hank piles his papers together, tapping the stack so it’s neat and even, and drops them down onto the table with a satisfactory slap. The meeting room goes quiet. Steve stiffens, as if he expects Hank to march over and punch him in the mouth. He won’t. Steve’s right, despite his insubordination, and Hank’s never been much of a stickler about that anyway. He’s frustrated, and it’s rubbing off on everyone else.

“I’m going for a smoke,” he says, patting his pocket to check that he has his cigarettes. “Be back in five.”

Maya gives him a sideways smile. “Take ten.”

Del, still obviously riled up, shoves one of the piles into an empty cardboard box and makes as if to follow. Hank shakes his head.

“Coming back with a clearer head ain’t a bad idea. If you’re done with that,” he says, nodding toward the box, “take it down to the archives. Walk’ll do you some good.”

She frowns, but another quick look at Steve – who’s listening, even now, and badly pretending he isn’t – makes her set her jaw and nod, firmly. “Yes, sir,” she says, and she lets him go.

Hank closes the door to the meeting room firmly behind him and looks out over the bullpen. It’s pretty nearly empty, only a handful of cops at their desks and a small handful more in the break room. Along the wall, several of the station’s new android units stand at attention, waiting to be needed. They give Hank the creeps. It would be one thing if they were stored out of sight, or at least closed their eyes when they weren’t in use. Staring into the middle distance, vacuous half-smiles on their faces… Yeah, creeps are the best way to put it.

As he makes his way to a rear exit, he passes by Jeffrey’s office. He’s standing near the door, talking on the phone, but when he sees Hank he says a hasty word and sticks his head out.

“Everything all right?” he asks, a hand over the bottom of the phone like he’s covering up the speaker. On the lit-up display, Hank can see the highlighted mute button. Old habits die hard. “Chief’s breathing down my neck hard about this red ice bust. They’re itching to see some progress.”

“So are we,” Hank says, still walking. “Hopefully there’s a breakthrough soon. I’m getting fresh air.”

“Smoke one for me. Wife talked me into quitting again.”

“She must want you around for a while,” he throws over his shoulder. “Lucky you.”

The weight of the air hits him as soon as he goes outside, like stepping into a lukewarm city-wide sauna. Going by the statistics, it’s pretty mild for a May in Detroit, but humidity makes everything about the weather that much more intense. Heat feels hotter, storms linger for days without any relief, and within thirty seconds, Hank feels damp with a capital D. He wipes at his brow, squinting up at the scattered clouds, and silently encourages them to block out the sun.

To his dismay, a delivery truck sits idling a few dozen feet down the wheelchair ramp from where he stands, leaning against the plexiglass railing outside the back door. Hank had come here so he wouldn’t be bothered, wanting to be alone while he tries to reorganize his thoughts. Not like the drivers usually want to talk, busy as they are, but it’s still irritating. The disruption, however, isn’t enough to make him want to relocate. Rolling his eyes, he takes note of the empty pallet jack waiting to go back in the truck and lights one of his cigarettes. Hopefully the guy doesn’t drive off and forget about it.

He always expects his first drag to feel better.

“Hey!”

Hank closes his eyes against a groan, blowing the smoke out his nose.

“Can I help you?” he asks, in his mildest voice, as he turns toward the man who spoke.

He stares. Blinks, a few times, hand frozen near his mouth.

Raphael Green smiles at him, teeth just as dazzlingly bright as they had been nearly a week before. Dressed in a pair of dark work pants and a slightly oversized blue polo, embroidered with the delivery company’s name, he looks more at ease here than he had in the temp agency. A nametag sticker, with the name “RAPH” printed on it in bold, neat letters, sits on his left breast. “No,” he says, flipping the clipboard he holds from one hand to the other. “I just saw you from the cab and thought I’d come say hi. Ask you how the investigation was going. I didn’t know this was your precinct.”

Hank can’t think of a single thing to say. His mind’s gone blank, overwhelmed by the sheer unlikeliness, unable to believe that this is a real thing that’s happening. Maybe he’s died, somehow, or he’s dreaming. Maybe God’s laughing at him right now, standing just up a concrete ramp from the most handsome man he’s ever seen and unable to do anything except gape and let his cigarette go to waste.

Raphael’s smile loses a bit of its luster, and his brow wrinkles. “You don’t remember me, do you? We met last Saturday. The painter-angel?”

Jesus Christ, of course he remembers that. He might as well have asked if he’d been named after the ninja turtle.

“No, yeah, sorry,” Hank says, desperately trying to pull himself together. He flicks the ash off the end of his cigarette, and hopes it gives him the appearance of nonchalance. “Raphael. Wasn’t expecting to see you again.” At least that’s the truth. “How are you?”

“Just fine, thank you. Any closer to finding McCreary? Part of me was almost hoping he’d come back to the agency, make your job a little easier.”

The thought of what’s waiting for him inside makes Hank itch for another drag. He takes a quick puff, trying not to be rude, and turns his head to exhale. “We’re working on it. Seems like the more we find out, the less we know.”

“That big, huh?”

“Yeah,” Hank sighs. “That big. You making a delivery here?”

Raphael chuckles, as pleasant a sound as it was the first time. “Yeah,” he says, “usually I run paper products, or fill in at grocery stores. Today I brought you…” He checks against his list, running a finger along the clipboard as if searching hard for his reference point. When he finds it, he looks up at Hank very seriously. “Toilet paper.”

“Somebody’s gotta do it. Thanks for your service.” He leaves the cigarette dangling from his mouth and reaches into his pocket to grab another one, holding it out between two fingers as an offering. “Need one for the road? I can share.”

Raphael takes a step closer, leaning against the plexiglass with one hip, but he puts his free hand into a pocket. “No thanks,” he says, “I don’t smoke. Not a huge fan of the smell.”

Now that he says, Hank thinks he remembers a similar comment he’d made at the agency. “Ah, shit. Sorry.”

“Don’t be.” He watches him closely as he stuffs the cigarette back in its box and pulls the lit one from his lips. The scrutiny makes him unsure whether it’s better to be polite and stub it out, or to casually go on doing what he was doing. In a terrible attempt at compromise, Hank goes back to holding it awkwardly, down by his hip. “Busting drug dealers is probably stressful work,” Raphael adds. “Work I’m keeping you from, too. I should go.”

“Nah, I’m on break,” Hank says. “But I’m sure you’re busy, too. You never stop needing toilet paper.”

“For sure.” Raphael grins. “It was nice seeing you again.” He raises a hand in farewell, turns around, and takes three brisk steps.

Then, he stops. This time, Hank watches him, taking note of the way he stalls and wondering if he’s dropped a pen, or something.

He turns, reclaims those three steps, and comes even further. Before Hank can blink, he’s just a few feet away, an earnest look in his eye and a determined set to his jaw. Abruptly, Hank realizes he’s missing the glasses he’d been wearing last weekend. Maybe he hadn’t needed them after all.

“Listen,” Raphael says, exhaling heavily, “I… this is out of character, for me. I don’t normally… well. Would you want to get coffee, sometime?”

He seems sincere, if nervous, clutching at his clipboard like it’s a lifeline. There are no lines around his deep brown eyes, no dark circles, no sign that he’s a day older than thirty. Sure, he might be down on his luck, or running from something, or in some kind of bad way – how many reasons can a young, apparently fit guy have for working with a shitty temp agency? – but he’s got plenty going for him, enough so that he could probably get anybody he wanted.

Hank, on the other hand, is pushing forty-five. He feels like that’s enough of a comparison to draw, a perfectly solid reason to be suspicious. Accordingly, he feels very little shame in raising an eyebrow and saying, “Seriously?”

Raphael just smiles.

“You seem like a good guy, Lieutenant,” he says. “I haven’t met a lot of those.”

Oh, _Jesus_ , doesn’t that hit him where it hurts. He thinks he’s getting the picture now, or at least a general idea, and the worst thing of all is that he knows what he wants. A feeling inside him stirs, one that he hasn’t felt since the last time he picked up with a new partner… but the excitement is short lived. Inside, the Red Ice Task Force fills the usurped meeting room with evidence against Hunter McCreary. He had watched Maya cross reference part of Raphael’s statement with several known sightings, key words linking back to specific pins on the map.

Hank knows what he has to say. Or, at least, he knows the spirit of what he has to say. The words get stuck in his mouth as he goes.

“I… with the case ongoing, I don’t know that it’d be… very ethical, of me, to… say yes to you… right now.”

The look Raphael gives him is physically painful. He winces. “Oh… no, I understand,” he says, shaking his head. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to… you know, stick my foot in it. Forget I asked.”

Making to lift his hand, Raphael catches himself partway through the repeated gesture and winces again, mouth pulling sideways. As he walks away, Hank can just feel the embarrassment and self-deprecation rolling off him in waves, a perfect match for how shitty Hank himself feels about it. He knows, he _knows_ , that saying no is the right thing to do, but it seems so unfair to turn the guy down when he’d probably been picking up on Hank’s vibe from the start. And he does want to, that hopeless part of him which led to a good handful of relationships he thought would be it firing on all cylinders. Even if it’s just naivete, or stupidity, he’s certain this could be _something_.

Thinking quickly, he hits upon a solution.

“After,” Hank calls, when Raphael’s already halfway to his truck, “could be a different story.”

Raphael pauses, looking over his shoulder. He squints. “After?”

“After all this is over. When we catch him.”

His white teeth make a brief appearance, covered up quickly as Raphael attempts to tamp down his reaction. Suspicious, maybe, the way Hank had felt when he asked in the first place. Can’t blame him for that.

“You’d say yes then?”

Hank could say yes. He nearly does, but the opposing, contrary parts of his brain – the parts that ruined the handful of relationships he thought would be it – have to check, one more time.

“You sure you wanna have coffee with me?”

This time, Raphael doesn’t hold back his smile. “Yeah. Yeah, I’m sure.”

They agree to exchange numbers, so Hank can make contact when the case is closed and there’s no chance of Raphael’s further involvement. In truth, he doesn’t know if a coffee date would violate any police procedure or code of conduct – the question’s never come up, before – but he’d rather not take his chances. Stubbing out the cigarette, barely used, he hands his phone over to Raphael with a new contact page open and patiently waits for him to pass it back. When he looks, it says “RAPH GREEN” with a smiling emoji next to it, a touch that simultaneously charms Hank and makes him wonder, again, if maybe he’s too old for this shit.

“My friends call me Raph,” he says as explanation. “You’ll text when you’re all set?”

“Yeah,” Hank says. His mouth is dry, or he’d say more. Maybe he wouldn’t, actually; it’s hard to keep the conversation going when Raphael’s beaming at him expectantly. “Yeah, I’ll text you.”

He watches him load the pallet jack into the truck, maneuvering it easily despite its weight and what looks like a stuck wheel, and waves a bit as he drives away. His phone feels heavier in his pocket, somehow.

When he goes inside, he stops off in the bathroom to splash water on his face – had he been so sweaty looking when Raphael asked him on that date? fucking hell – and then heads back to the meeting room. Steve sits with another officer, away from the map, and seems a bit disgruntled. Del probably chewed him out again while he was gone. Besides that, very little seems to have changed.

“Hey, Lieutenant,” Del says. She’s moved the report he was poring over to her station, apparently through with evidence sorting. New highlighter marks stand out on one of the pages. “Feeling refreshed?”

Hank huffs, as a response, and pats her shoulder on his way by. Maya steps aside to give him a clear view of their map, taking one of the digital markers with her and throwing it into the trash bin. He taps a pin located a few miles away from Expedience Staffing, which opens a short description of the building and a list of its prior owners. The answer’s here, somewhere. They just have to find it.

“Let’s catch this fucker.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "There is something at work in my soul, which I do not understand."  
> \- _Frankenstein_ , Mary Shelley


	4. love and liberty

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Someone has been here, recently. There are marks made by fresh droppings spread via a workman’s boot, and the birds seem perturbed both by their presence and by whatever had made the sound that brought them inside. Connor doesn’t have to open his mouth to sense how much avian fecal matter and dander there is in the air.
> 
> “Hey,” Hank says, “come look at this.”
> 
> The bathroom seems empty of birds, though the floor isn’t much cleaner. In the sink, a grayish-green sludge blocks the drain and stains what must have once been white porcelain. Several feathers stick up out of it like a garnish.
> 
> “rA9 again. All over the place. Guess the neighbor was right."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for your patience! I have an extra beefy chapter as an apology for my lateness, and an apology for what's probably going to be at least a little while before I update again. We are starting to really get somewhere and I'm very excited to keep this project going. As usual, all my love and gratitude to the friends who have encouraged me and talked me through my plotting troubles, as well as the wonderful people I'm meeting through this fandom. You're all amazing.

_May 27 th, 2030_  
_4:10PM_  
_

Hank intends to get to the coffee shop early, to give himself time to settle his nerves and to slam at least one disgustingly sweet cup with too many shots of espresso. He needs the sugar and the caffeine, run ragged as usual at the end of a long, high-intensity case – but of course, he spots Raphael Green through the window even before he’s set foot in the place. For a terrible moment, Hank’s worried he got the time wrong. Pulling out his phone, he checks the texts: four thirty, they’d agreed, it says so right there. Date, time, place, all delivered with one of Raphael’s favorite emojis. It’s not a linguistic quirk Hank would tolerate in just anybody… but, he thinks as he steals another glance at him through the window, it’s not a deal breaker.

He’s wearing his glasses again, perched on the edge of his nose as he reads a small paperback novel. Maybe he brings a book with him everywhere. He seems like the type.

After Hank and his Red Ice Task Force tracked down Hunter McCreary, bringing him in as well as several accomplices and a shit ton of contraband, texting Raphael was not the first thing on Hank’s mind. It wasn’t even the second, or the third, and it ended up taking him a couple days to remember what he’d promised. By that point, he felt strange acknowledging the offer at all. Raphael might have had time to reconsider, or to find somebody more his speed than a rough around the edges cop in his mid-forties. Maybe he’d even forgotten.

When he worked up the nerve to send a message, however, a simple “hey” sent late enough in the evening he was belatedly afraid it might be interpreted as some kind of… whatever the kids call it these days… he got a reply within a minute. Instead of a brush off, or a stilted, awkward rejection, it read, “Hey! Glad to hear from you. Hope this means you caught him!”

From there, it was surprisingly easy. Raphael brought up the coffee date first, gave him a list of his days off, and picked the location. He seemed excited, resisting each of Hank’s attempts to give him an easy out in case he wasn’t feeling it anymore, and even texted him in the interim between their first contact and their meeting time. It was never about anything particularly serious, but Hank read his meaning loud and clear.

Watching him absentmindedly run a hand through his hair, pushing the dreads hanging over his forehead out of the way, Hank feels a twist in his gut. His own hair is short, not quite buzzed but growing out of something like it, and he’s wrinkling in places that would have horrified him twenty years ago. He takes care of himself, sure, in a half-hearted sort of way, but he isn’t… Well. He isn’t like Raphael, of course, and he wouldn’t know how to begin becoming anything other than the big, cranky son of a bitch he is. Regardless, the comparison doesn’t feel great.

But he’s been standing outside the shop for several minutes, staring like a stalker while a handful of pedestrians pick their way around him. He could take a walk around the block, try to get himself under control. It’s an avoidance tactic, and he knows it is, but it’s still an option. That somehow settles him down. Clearing his throat, squaring his shoulders, and doing his best to look more like a guy on the town than an anxious cop, he opens the door and heads inside.

The layout is different than it looked through the window. Raphael’s table is down a short flight of stairs, positioned perfectly central to the window – must be the best seat in the house. Closing the door gently, a small trio of bells tinkling to announce his arrival, Hank glances around the room. On his part of the split level, a young woman behind the bar puts out a new stack of paper cups and eyes him, waiting to see where he goes. He gives her a tight-lipped smile.

“I’ll be back,” he says, regretting it the instant he opens his mouth. She raises an eyebrow, and almost definitely watches him as he lumbers down the stairs and over to where Raphael intently stares at his book, chin propped up in one hand. He decides, very pointedly, not to worry about her. Instead, he hovers over Raphael, trying to decide how to interrupt his train of thought, when brown eyes dart up suddenly to meet his. “Hey,” he says, taking a step back as Raphael quickly gets to his feet.

“Hey!” Raphael puts out a hand as if he expects Hank to shake it, then pulls it away. He seems like he’s at a loss, thank god. Hank hasn’t felt so self-conscious since his twenties, but it’s that much better if he isn’t the only one falling over himself. After a moment’s deliberation, Raphael busies himself by slipping the book into a jacket pocket, hidden in the lining somewhere. “You’re early! I wasn’t expecting you just yet.”

“Wasn’t really expecting you, either,” Hank says, deciding honesty is the best policy.  “Hope I didn’t… you know, throw you off.”

“No. No, I just… I guess I’m nervous.” Raphael rubs the back of his neck, glancing at his shoes. When he looks up at Hank – it is up, Hank realizes with a jolt, he’s got several inches on him at least – he’s wearing the most charming self-effacing smile Hank’s ever seen. It’s like someone designed him to fuck Hank over, specifically. “I wasn’t kidding when I said this isn’t something I’m used to.”

Hank laughs, the sound a lot more natural than he’d thought it would be. He feels like he’s settling in, getting used to the inherent awkwardness that comes with first date territory. “It’s been a while for me, too. I get it. Can I get you something else?” He gestures at the cup already sitting on the table, steam wafting from the thin hole in its lid. “Something to eat?”

“Uh,” Raphael says, slowly reclaiming his seat. He pulls a face, that warm grin turning into something with a hint of a wince. “That’s really nice of you, but, uh… This is embarrassing, but I have pretty severe food allergies. It’s hard to accommodate so I usually just take care of myself.”

“Food allergies?” Hank asks. “Like, gluten, and shit?”

“That’s one of them. It makes me feel like I’m being a picky jerk.”

“It’s not picky if it’s something you can’t control. What do you want? I can handle a few complex instructions.”

“That’s sweet, but I’m okay.” Raphael sighs, still staring up at him with an expression like he’s glad Hank came. Like he’s excited. It’s definitely time for Hank to stop worrying about whether he’s just here to fulfill an obligation. “Get whatever you like, I’ll hold our spot. Best seat in the house.”

“Figured,” Hank says. With only a moment’s hesitation, a split second to question his judgement, he drops a hand on Raphael’s shoulder and squeezes. He jumps at being touched, as if no one’s given him anything more than a cordial handshake in a long time, but he doesn’t throw him off. Instead, he’s treated to a soft inhale – a gentle noise, nearly lost in the surrounding din of the shop, something that drops his stomach somewhere around his shoes – and another smile.

Raphael does a lot of smiling. He eagerly gives them away, like everything Hank says is worth that level of rapt engagement. It definitely isn’t warranted. Several times he catches himself talking too much about work, both because it’s all he’s eaten and breathed for weeks and because Raphael is a very good listener. He says he doesn’t mind, but Hank still tries to steer the conversation toward other things. Typical first date things.

“Got any family around?” he asks, shaking his cup so the ice resettles. Not his usual fare, but it looked good on the sandwich board display menu, and it’s too hot outside for him to warm up with a regular cup of coffee.

“Nope,” Raphael replies, popping the word in a way that plainly says he doesn’t want to divulge more. “You?”

“Not anymore. Parents are both dead, now.”

To his credit, Raphael doesn’t say he’s sorry. He pulls a face, though, expressive features conveying sadness and sympathy without needing to say a word.

“Dad was kind of a dick,” he says, like that explains everything. He thinks it does. “Mom did her best, but we weren’t close after I left home. I made choices they didn’t approve of, fucked around with people they didn’t like. It was easier to just stay disengaged and like a photo on Facebook once every month so they knew I was still kicking.”

Raphael nods, chin in his hand again. His cup of tea sits mostly forgotten. “Did they not approve of your wanting to join the police force?”

“Are you kidding?” Hank laughs. “That probably made them happier than anything else I did in my entire life. To them it looked like I was getting my act together, finding a good job and settling down.”

“You don’t seem very settled.”

Hank doesn’t miss the gleam in Raphael’s eyes. It makes him want to puff up his chest, even preen a little at the attention. He’s been getting looks like that since he was young, and he knows what they mean.

“You should’ve seen me fifteen years ago,” he says, leaning back in his chair. The wood creaks in protest. “I was a live wire. Did some dumb shit in the space between graduating college and getting into the academy. And after, I guess, but I cooled off a bit with time.”

“Bet you’ve got all sorts of stories,” Raphael says. He sounds almost wistful, a longing for something undefinable in his voice. Nostalgic, maybe? It’s hard to say. The melancholy gives their talk just enough of an edge, a bitter tint that leaves him… interested. Hank wants to know more. The investigator in him itches to delve deeper, to uncover mysteries and secrets like he would on a case.

All those impulses get squashed, before they take up too much space in Hank’s mind. He isn’t working right now. He can go slow.

“If I tell you the best ones now, I’ll run out of material for next time,” he says. It’s presumptuous… but it works. Raphael beams at him like he’s the fucking sun. Makes Hank want to look at him sideways, afraid he’ll go blind. “I’m sick of hearing myself talk anyway. Tell me about your deal. Whatever you feel like sharing.”

Wrapping his long fingers around his tea, he takes a deep breath and stares at the table. “Not much to tell, I guess. You saw my employee records, so you know how long I’ve been working at the temp agency,” he says with a shrug. “That’s pretty much all I do, I drive trucks.”

Hank’s sure Raphael didn’t bring up the records to make him feel guilty, or strange. It’s just a fact. Water is wet, and Hank could run all the background checks in the world on his date if he felt like completely abusing his position. The idea skeeves him out, a little, mind wandering to other cops in his position who might have been tempted to utilize their resources. It’s happened, in the past. He can’t even imagine wanting to.

“You read,” he says, to push those thoughts down and forget he’d ever had them.

Raphael snorts. As if on instinct, he pats the slight bulge in his jacket where he tucked the book away, just over his heart. “I read,” he agrees. Looking pensive, he drums blunt nails against his chest. “My home life wasn’t great, when I was younger, so I used to read anything I could get my hands on. It made me feel… I don’t know, better about myself. No matter what else was going on, I could escape, even if it was only for a while.”

“You made it out?” Hank asks, in a softer voice than he intended. He’d suspected there was some history there. Some kind of past. It doesn’t matter, really, but he’s been around long enough to know like recognizes like.

Smiling, again, he sets his hand next to Hank’s. Not so close that they’re touching, he isn’t so bold as that. But it’s near enough. “I did. It’s been a couple years. I’m still building from the ground up, basically, but it’s hard not to be happy. I’ve got pretty steady employment, and I keep a lot of books at home. It’s not very exciting, though, compared to what you do.”

“After a month like the one I’ve had?” Hank chuckles. “A quiet night with a book sounds fuckin’ delightful. I don’t read as much as I used to in college. Probably haven’t been to a library since then, either.”

“If you tell me what you like, I could always make recommendations. You could even borrow my books, if you wanted; plenty of them are just collecting dust on the shelf.”

“How many do you have?”

Raphael whistles, tapping his foot a few times as he considers the question. “Hundreds, I think. I lost track.”

“And you’ve read them all?”

Another shrug is the only answer he gets, a shrug and a quirk of his lip that says _what do you think_?

He doesn’t know. It gets harder to keep his head on straight with every minute he spends in this coffee shop, across the table from someone he’s beginning to like very much.

“Can I ask you something?” he says, before he can stop himself. Raphael blinks back surprise, but he nods. “What made you want to do this? This…”

Hank flaps a hand between them, suddenly uncomfortable with saying the word “date” out loud.

Raphael hums. “I meant what I said, when I saw you at the police station. You seem like a good guy. And…” He shuffles his feet and ducks his head, like he’s trying to cover up a blush. “Well, I don’t think it’s entirely out of line to say I think you’re handsome. That’s got to be obvious, by now.”

This would be a good time for Hank to say he thinks Raphael’s handsome, too – gorgeous, actually, the prettiest person who’s ever shown an interest in him and shaping up to be the nicest, too. He can’t say anything. His tongue sits heavy in his mouth, an embarrassing weight as he _definitely_ flushes and probably goes splotchy at the nose. Raphael doesn’t notice, still talking.

“There was an element of risk involved in the asking, I guess, but… It was worth the try. I figured if I was wrong, you’d be decent enough to turn me down nicely.”

He knows what risk he means. People have brought it up to him before. Shaking off the speechlessness, he asks, maybe blunter than he should, “Didn’t think I swung your way?”

Raphael blinks, a few times. Then he spreads his hands as an apology. “Being a cop seems like a hypermasculine job.”

“Some of the guys are like that,” Hank says. “Back when I first joined up it was a boy’s club. These days, that doesn’t fly anymore, usually. I don’t know, best way I have of putting it is I’m equal opportunity.”

“That’s a funny way of circumnavigating the word ‘bisexual.’”

Hank’s fist tightens around his cup. Watered down dregs spurt up his straw, out and over his hand like a grade school volcano. Raphael quickly hands him a napkin from the small stack he’d arranged on his side of the table, each square edge lined up perfectly with the next. He starts to apologize, as if it’s his fault Hank hulked out on an innocent plastic cup, but Hank shakes his head.

“I grew up in the eighties and nineties, kid,” he says, wiping at the table. “Happy for people who can call themselves whatever they want, and all, but I never got used to that. It’s too late now.”

Wincing, Raphael puts his hands in his lap. “I didn’t mean–”

“I know,” he says, and he does. “It’s not wrong. It’s just not what I’d say.”

They sit on that, for a while, several minutes of silence passing between them. It’s more thoughtful than it is awkward, but he’d be lying if he said it wasn’t awkward at all. He gets up to throw away the wet napkins and his cup in a trash can by the stunted stairs, and when he turns back he sees Raphael watching him. Studying him, is probably a better way to put it. His eyes track him up and down twice, not hungry in the way Hank’s used to, but… desperate, maybe. Like he’s trying to commit him to memory before he disappears.

Shit, if he feels that badly about their little hiccup, Hank should say something. He comes up with several options on the walk back, trusting he’ll land on the right one at the last minute, but Raphael perches on the edge of his seat and reaches out to take Hank’s wrist even before he sits.

“Lieutenant,” he says. Even before Hank frowns, he grimaces. “Hank. I just wanted to say, I… I’m glad you were open to this opportunity. With me. I’m very, very glad.”

He lets go before Hank decides how to respond, always moving quicker than he can think. It makes Hank laugh, a short puff of air. “You know I’m not gonna walk out on ya, right?” he asks, dropping into his chair with a grunt. “You’d have to work a lot harder to scare me off. One time, a girl I met online barfed right in my lap in the middle of a movie.”

Raphael laughs, too, a sharp and startled sound. He grins, _again_ ; Hank swears he’s been smiled at more today than he has in the last few years.

They stay in the shop until seven, when the barista begins making obvious overtures towards closing. Raphael drops the remainders of their garbage into the trash can and apologizes to the girl for losing track of time. He stuffs a bill into the tip jar, tells her he’ll see her next time, and Hank trails behind him as he heads out the door. Nothing’s changed, outside. Sunset is still a couple hours off, and despite how his body’s still feeling the strain of pushing itself for weeks without stopping, he’s almost energized. Eager to keep the night going. It could be the caffeine, though that’s not likely with as much coffee he drinks at the station.

No, he thinks, glancing surreptitiously at Raphael as he checks his phone. He knows that’s not it.

“I’ve got work tomorrow,” Raphael sighs, putting his phone away. “Early morning delivery.”

“More TP?” Hank asks, trying to cover up his disappointment.

“Nah, I’ve driven for this company before. It’s probably just ballpoint pens. Listen, text me some books you like. I’ll pick one of mine out for you and bring it next time.”

He sounds so sure that there’ll be a next time, just like Hank had earlier when he made that gamble, that he doesn’t have the heart to tease him about it. In a way, he’s very glad they don’t have to do the whole postmortem thing. They both know what they want.

“Next time,” he agrees, sticking a hand in his pocket. “I’ll pick the place?”

“Text me.”

“Now?”

Raphael rolls his eyes, and then he stands on his toes, another shift too fast for Hank to catch. With his fingers wrapped around the wrist sticking out of Hank’s pocket, the same wrist, he kisses his cheek. Before he pulls away, his lips ghosting over the day’s accumulated stubble, he practically breathes, “Bye, Hank.”

Jesus Christ. Jesus fucking Christ.

“Yeah,” he grumbles, meeting Raphael’s whole “butter wouldn’t melt in my mouth” look with a feigned glare. The effect is completely ruined by the way he can’t keep his smirk on the right side of sardonic. He’s pretty sure it comes across more like he’s smitten. “See you, Raph.”

He waits for Raphael to safely get in a cab before he turns and walks to where he parked his car. Despite the way his blood is boiling, settling lower in his stomach than he’d like on a public street, he’s at least that much of a gentleman.

 

* * *

  
_November 6 th, 2038_  
_3:16 PM  
__

When Hank gets back in the car, he brings his pineapple soda with him. The remains of the burger and its cardboard receptacle have been disposed of; hopefully in the proper way, but Connor isn’t about to risk their newfound tenuous camaraderie by asking the lieutenant whether he’s littered. Instead, he glances out the passenger’s side window and studies the rain drops streaking the glass, finishing up the various tasks he’s been accomplishing while he waited.

“Got an address?” Hank asks, taking a noisy sip through his straw before setting the drink in a cup holder. It barely fits, the base so wide it wobbles in its place. Connor predicts a strong possibility that during their drive it will tip so far that it spills. Judging by the stickiness of the flooring in one section, near the front edge of his seat, he’d hazard that it wouldn’t be the first time that happened.

He gives Hank the address and resists the urge to steady the cup as Hank makes a haphazard U-turn and heads away from the construction zone, tapping their destination one-handed into his tablet. “Also,” he says as a preamble, in lieu of commenting on unsafe driving habits, “I followed up with your request to interview Todd Williams.”

“Guy who reported the AX400?”

“Correct. No one has been able to contact him again through the channels he provided. If one of the other officers has a chance, they said they would visit the address on file and see if he is at home. Considering the current uptick in reported crimes, I would say it is unlikely that someone else will find the time, or that he’ll still be there when they check.”

“Especially if it is his daughter we saw with the deviant.” Hank sighs. “Fuck. I don’t like leaving a little girl twisting in the wind like that.”

Connor adjusts his tone to match soothing parameters, intended primarily to calm a suspect, and to lure them into divulging information with the unspoken promise that it would be safe to do so. In this case, the application is different. He needs Hank to focus on their mission. “Our assignment is to handle deviant cases,” he says, turning to study Hank’s profile. His nose wrinkles, nostrils flaring slightly on a loud sniff. “There are too many for us to divide our attention between them all, and until another sighting is reported, we have no way of knowing where the AX400 has gone. There’s very little we can do.”

“I should have followed up on it right away,” Hank says. He doesn’t seem to be looking for sympathy, or to be told that he’s done the best he could. It’s a statement of fact, for him, an admission of what he thinks is a failing. “Keeping a kid safe is more important than digging around in some buggy robot’s head.”

Connor considers this. When Hank takes a sharp turn, swearing quietly at the map for recalculating in the middle of their route, he puts a hand down on the lid even before he can think to do so. It’s a quick move. The soda sloshes inside its container, but it doesn’t spill.

“If it makes you feel any better,” he says, “the AX400 is a domestic model.” He takes his hand away as Hank reaches for the soda, putting the straw to his lips. “Part of their programming involves childcare.”

Balancing the drink between his hand and his thigh, Hank taps a finger on the lid. It does seem to make him feel better, if only slightly. At a red light, he gives Connor a quick look. “Thought you said deviancy makes androids behave contrary to their programming.”

“I said it makes them behave unpredictably. That isn’t necessarily the same thing.”

“So it won’t fling the poor girl off a cliff first chance it gets, huh?”

“I can’t say anything with certainty… but it’s unlikely. After managing to cross an automated highway without a scratch, I don’t know it will want to try its luck again anytime soon. Besides,” he adds, as Hank drinks what must be the dregs, judging by the sounds of air whistling through the straw, “it would have to go well out of its way to find a cliff.”

To Connor’s dismay, Hank reaches behind his seat to drop the cup somewhere in the back. Ice still rattles inside, but that apparently doesn’t bother him. As soon as it’s out of his hands, he seems to forget it’s ever existed. “Was that a joke?” he asks, tapping his tablet back to life. “Or were you just stating a fact?”

Humor is a nebulous concept. No two people will find all the same jokes amusing, and so Connor knows that CyberLife has more trouble with programming a funny android than they do with programming a sexually desirable one. He could explain, but he doubts Hank would like to hear the ins and outs of how he’s been predisposed to adopting and adapting his social companion’s quirks, to make him a better conversational partner. Based on their tenuous start, any overt reminders that Connor is a machine acting out a preassigned role lead to a negative reaction.

Apparently, he’s taken too long to answer. Hank grunts, low in his throat, and doesn’t speak again.

He doesn’t bother to turn on his music, for such a short trip. Or perhaps it’s because he’s thinking, his lips pursed slightly and his fingers periodically tensing against the steering wheel. Connor had meant what he said about not listening to music, but he supposes, what with the noise generated by the sort of bands Hank prefers, that it is easier to think without it.

They park on the street, in a rundown neighborhood that’s evidently escaped Detroit’s extensive beautification projects. Outdated meters that must be at least three decades old line the sidewalk, just barely matching up with faded paint that once denoted parking spaces. Connor has to open his door carefully to ensure he doesn’t hit it against one. As he waits for Hank to join him, he hesitantly glances down through the window to survey the contents of Hank’s backseat. It isn’t as bad as he expected, but there’s still at least a week’s worth of accumulated garbage. There are several empty Chicken Feed cups.

“What am I walking into here?” Hank asks as he steps up onto the sidewalk, stuffing his keys into his pocket. “What did the report say?”

“This morning, a tenant here reported that he believes there’s a squatter in the apartment above his. That was the most recent of…” He checks the records as Hank heads toward the front door, obviously expecting him to follow. There’s no mention of Connor staying in the car this time. “Seventeen reports, in the last six months.”

Hank huffs. “Persistent. Nobody ever followed up on it?”

“No,” he says, “the tenant is well-known for being a nuisance. This afternoon, however, just after three, he called again and modified his statement. He claimed not only to have seen the squatter, who he says is a young adult male, but that the man had an LED under his cap.”

Connor takes several long steps so that he reaches the door first, pulling it open and standing to the side. Hank huffs in annoyance, but he makes no comment as he walks over the threshold.

There’s no one in the lobby. The building looks and feels deserted, dilapidation so extreme Connor searches its records to see if anyone’s tried to condemn it. Whoever owns these apartments must be sidestepping the laws somewhere… but that isn’t Hank’s jurisdiction. Their jurisdiction. They have a different job to do.

“Sure,” Hank says, poking around the room. He pulls at a few of the mailbox slots to see if they open. “Nobody’ll listen, so you make up a story about there being an android to get attention. I’m sure this is a _real_ legit concern this guy has. Just his luck that if somebody so much as sneezes right now, we’re gonna be assigned the case. Damn it.”

For his part, Connor checks the security guard’s desk. A scan shows him rat feces and what should be a concerning amount of mold from a leak he can track down into the pipes below the main floor, but nothing pertinent to their investigation. “It could be unrelated to our objective,” he concedes. “Still, it’s better that we look.”

From there, he heads toward a placard that says “STAIRS” and goes to pull open the nearby door. Hank doesn’t follow. He’s half inside an elevator, hand resting on the rusty metal cage like he actually intends to pull it closed. Connor doubts it would move even if they both tried to force it.

“You said it’s on the fifth floor,” Hank says, as his explanation.

Connor frowns. “This building has not been up to code for some time. There are no recent records available to show that that elevator has been serviced or maintained. It may be unsafe.”

“If I have to choose,” Hank intones, speaking slowly in a way that Connor’s beginning to understand means he’s going to employ hyperbole to make his point, “between dying of a heart attack climbing four flights of stairs and getting crushed by a broken elevator, I’ll pick the Tower of Terror, thanks. You can take the stairs if you want.”

“No,” he says. In the event of an emergency, it’s better if he sticks with the lieutenant to ensure a favorable outcome. His body can be replaced, if need be, but the odds of Hank coming back from certain death are a definitive zero. “Be careful touching that,” he adds, as he steps past Hank and places himself in a back corner of the elevator. “You haven’t had a tetanus shot in several decades.”

“Of course he’s got my medical records,” Hank grumbles to himself, “why wouldn’t he? Not an invasion of privacy or anything.” He jabs a button on the elevator’s panel, grunting in satisfaction when it lights up beneath his thumb. There’s no other response for several seconds, which is enough to spike Hank’s heart rate so that Connor’s autogenerated task list prompts him to look for whatever it is causing him so much stress. Then the door slowly groans to life, rumbling shut with a metallic clang.

Assured that they have at least a short amount of time, Connor closes his eyes. He hasn’t reported to CyberLife since before they picked up Ralph, when that was a matter of some urgency. Since then, they’ve discovered very little that might help uncover what it is, exactly, causing the deviancy problems. Ideally, there will be more soon. There’s no shortage of cases for them to investigate, ranging from recent to cold, and if this one bears no fruit, they have other options. Still, Connor knows he’s on a time limit. Amanda never lets him forget that. He has a job to do, and if he doesn’t do it well, he knows her hand is poised over the deactivation button.

The idea of being sent back to CyberLife does not affect him. It will happen inevitably, whether because he fails or because they’ve made improvements to his model and his programming. What spurs him on is that familiar drive to fulfill his purpose. They gave Connor this responsibility. They assigned him to Hank and left him to make the best of it. He intends to do so.

The catalogue of the afternoon’s events is unimpressive, but he makes special note of his improving relationship with Lieutenant Anderson. Their efficacy as a team increases the mission success rate potential by at least fifteen percent.

Abruptly, he realizes the elevator has stopped moving. Hank is standing in the hallway past the open door, eyeing him with… He supposes it must be unease. His brow is furrowed, and his lip curls slightly as he says Connor’s name. Likely, it’s not the first time.

“I’m sorry,” Connor says, shifting his shoulders and adjusting his tie. “I was filing a report with CyberLife. You were saying?”

Hank takes a heavy breath. “Just trying to get your attention. Thought maybe you ran out of batteries, or something.”

Ah. Connor smiles, to assuage Hank’s concern. “You needn’t worry about that. My unit model has a charge life of at least–”

“Spare me that user manual bullshit, please,” he says, holding up a hand to stop him.

The “please” is a new development. Hank has never been so polite to him before. He dips back into his report to update their increased success percentage.

“Do you plan on staying in the elevator all day?”

“No,” Connor says. Marking the file as COMPLETE, he sends it across his digital connection to Amanda and trusts that she’ll put it in the right hands. In a few seconds, he should get a confirmation notice that it’s been received. “I’m coming.”

The hallway is worse than the lobby. That seems to have at least been maintained to give the impression of cleanliness, which Connor wouldn’t have supposed until he saw this in comparison. Paint peels off the walls in huge chunks, exposing gray plaster covered in spray-painted graffiti that seems to be about two years old. Hank sniffs a few times, as if reacting to a smell, but he doesn’t make note of it aloud. Connor opens his mouth and extends the tip of his tongue slightly, to see if he can pick up anything unusually strong on his sensors. Nothing comes back. It’s incredibly dirty, dust and trash and cobwebs and feathers all piled up into corners, and if there was mold downstairs the likelihood of there being mold upstairs is high. All of this probably makes for a hostile olfactory environment.

“Hey, were you really making a report, back there in the elevator?” Hank asks, brushing accumulated grime off a number plate to the right of a thick door. It’s the apartment they’re looking for. Hank nods toward it and then settles himself against the wall. “Just by closing your eyes?”

Connor picks a flake of paint, rolling it into the palm of his hands. He doesn’t have to put it in his mouth to know that it’s lead-based. “Correct,” he says to Hank, letting the flake fall to the ground. “I’m beginning to suspect we ought to report the owner of these apartments to the city. These conditions are hazardous in the short term, let alone for those who are living here.”

“In my copious amount of free time.” Hank shrugs. “I’m not disagreeing with ya, but there’s lots of buildings like this all over Detroit. We’d be putting it at the bottom of a very long list.”

“I’ve found lead in the paint, as well as mold.”

Hank lifts a hand as if to cover his mouth. He wrestles with himself, for a moment, and then shrugs again and seems to decide it’s not worth the trouble. He’s been breathing whatever there is in the air since they got here. Perhaps he feels the damage is either unlikely, or already done. “That might bump it up a few spots,” he concedes. “Find some asbestos and they’ll shut it down tomorrow. You gonna knock, or should I?”

Connor raps on the door. No one answers. They stand still in a lengthy silence, waiting for a reply or to hear someone pretending they aren’t there. “Anybody home?” he shouts, banging with his fist this time. The door shakes on its hinges, rattling noisily. “Open up! Detroit Police!”

A clatter comes from inside. It’s distant, but loud, like something slamming against the floor and scraping, hard, into the wood.

Hank jumps to attention even before Connor’s finished registering what’s happened. He retreats several paces from the door, reaching for his gun with his knees bent at the ready. “Stay behind me,” he says, with a tone that brooks no argument.

“Got it,” Connor says, and he does.

Again, Hank’s taken Connor by surprise. Human instinct can’t always be perfectly replicated by machines – at least, not yet. Even with his superior processing speed and near instantaneous response time, the benefits of having a seasoned officer as his partner outweigh any detriments brought on by Hank’s less favorable behavior.

With a swift kick, Hank breaks the lock and knocks the door wide open. He heads into the apartment slowly but with purpose, gun held high in steady hands that aren’t shaking at all. Connor waits at each new room they encounter, lingering outside the doorway until Hank tells him it’s clear. Then they trade places. He runs perfunctory scans, looking to find any trace of life or recently unsettled furniture, and after each comes back negative, he returns to where Hank waits for him. At the last door, their eyes meet for a moment. Something is moving in the room beyond, a quiet susurrus of what sounds like low voices just barely carrying over the whistle of Hank breathing through his nose. Once Connor is close enough, behind him as requested, he shifts his center of gravity and shoulders hard to fling the door open.

The abrupt movement and noise startles a large number of pigeons. A _very_ large number, Connor determines, leaning backward as some of the birds panic and fly directly toward Hank to escape. He makes a noise Connor’s never heard before, ducking down to avoid collision, eyes closed and his arms protecting his face. “What the fuck is this!?”

“They’re birds,” Connor replies, maneuvering around Hank. In the hallway, he’d seen feathers from multiple types of birds, but he hadn’t expected that they all might live here at once. The majority of these, so far as he can tell, are common rock pigeons.

“I fucking know they’re birds!” Hank bellows, straightening up. He points his gun in multiple directions, taking in the sheer number of them with a dawning horror that seems outsized based on their situation. “What the fuck are they all doing here?”

With all the noise they’ve made, Connor very much doubts their suspect would be foolish enough to remain and confront them. Still, he heads to a pair of thin slatted doors covering a closet and pulls them open, disturbing another collection of pigeons. They ruffle their feathers, puffing up at his intrusion, and then settle back into sleep. Piled in one corner, a tower of birdseed boxes occupies a solid fourth of the closet’s floor space.

“Whoever lives here has been feeding them,” he calls, turning his head to see Hank lingering in the open door frame between the kitchen and the bathroom.

“That’s disgusting.”

Connor slides the closet shut again, leaving the pigeons in peace. “People keep birds as pets.”

“Yeah, in cages, and like, one or two at a time. This is a nightmare. Jesus, it stinks.”

Someone has been here, recently. There are marks made by fresh droppings spread via a workman’s boot, and the birds seem perturbed both by their presence and by whatever had made the sound that brought them inside. Still, their man is apparently gone. Hank reaches beneath his button up and drags the undershirt up over his nose, trying to filter out what must be a very unpleasant smell. Connor doesn’t have to open his mouth to sense how much avian fecal matter and dander there is in the air.

“Hey,” Hank says, through the faded, stretched out depiction of a fish on his t-shirt, “come look at this.”

The bathroom seems empty of birds, though the floor isn’t much cleaner. In the sink, a grayish-green sludge blocks the drain and stains what must have once been white porcelain. Several feathers stick up out of it like a garnish.

“What is it?” he asks. He’ll wait for Hank to leave before he takes a sample, to avoid unnecessary confrontation.

Then he sees.

Hank coughs, a damp, staccato sound only slightly muffled by his cover. “rA9 again. All over the place. Guess the neighbor was right.”

“It’s unlikely a human would have done this,” Connor agrees. He takes a step back, examining the wall in landscape, taking extensive stock of each letter and mark, even down to the cracks. Some of the words overlap an angular drawing that takes up half of the bathroom, like a maze. At the center, there is nothing. Humming, he takes the quarter from his pocket and threads it slowly through his fingers.

“Fucking hell,” Hank groans, “I can’t live like this.” He lumbers into the other room, leaving the bathroom and Connor behind. Taking advantage, Connor dips his hand into the sink and finds… blue blood. Old traces, very old, kept active solely because of whatever else is cultivating with it. The model and serial number of their latest deviant go straight into Connor’s files.

“I think we ought to consider the possibility of a pattern, Lieutenant,” he calls, raising his voice just enough for Hank to hear him from wherever he’s retreated. “The cases on which we’ve collaborated so far all involve an android spending a period of time in a squalid environment. Each–”

Hank reappears unexpectedly, the rumpled collar of his t-shirt returned to its place mostly beneath the button-up. He’s got one hand in his pocket, and the other is rubbing beneath his nose as he sniffs, repeatedly.

“Opened the window,” he says as explanation, while Connor stares. “Got enough fresh air in my lungs I can stuff some Vicks up my nose without trapping the smell of bird shit in there.”

“You shouldn’t put petroleum jelly directly in your nostrils. It can lead to several dangerous health concerns regarding your lungs.”

“What are you, my fucking mom? Go back to explaining, you’re almost tolerable like that.”

Connor rubs the remaining traces of Thirium against his thumb, just as he keeps the coin moving back and forth with his other hand. Hank watches him with a pinched expression.

“Each of them,” he continues, “was also obsessed with this sign. So far, what we’re seeing fits in with our previous experience. What we’re missing is a violent crime. Ortiz was stabbed repeatedly with a kitchen knife, and the John Doe found in the bathtub had his throat cut.”

Hank grunts as he takes this in, frowning over at the tub. “Two similar crime scenes don’t make a pattern,” he says. “So, what, we’re looking for skeletons in the closet? It’s not like we’re dealing with a serial killer.”

“No.” Squatting, Connor reaches out and picks up a thick sharpie apparently abandoned on the floor. Its cap is missing, no doubt strewn somewhere, and yet… Carefully, he draws a thick line along the back of his quarter. It writes easily. The tip is still wet. “But there aren’t many differences between service androids, whether they’re housekeepers or gardeners. Recoding a brain, for lack of any better term, wouldn’t be effective if done for every model. Some repetition is to be expected.”

A stool has been recently disrupted, scrapes from its abrupt movement clear just as the boot marks were in the other room.

“Not from you, though,” Hank says, backing away as Connor stands. “You’re state of the art, right? All original up there?”

“One of a kind,” he agrees. The replacement bodies waiting for his memories down in the basement of CyberLife hardly count. There is only one consciousness that can be called Connor. He is, in fact, unique.

Hank starts to wander away, as if he’s uninterested in Connor’s answer. “Not a lot of places to be hiding bodies in here,” he says, nudging open a cupboard in the kitchen with the toe of his shoe. “Unless maybe it chopped them up first. Or threw them into the rafters.”

The bathroom’s given him all the clues it can. Connor leaves the marker where he’d found it and puts the quarter away again. A frisson runs beneath his synthetic skin, sparking his chassis like a physical electric shock. There’s something to find, here. He knows that surely as he knows his own name.

“Perhaps not,” he says, turning to examine the army jacket spread out on a chest of drawers. “But that’s what we’re here to investigate.”

They uncover very little by way of murdered humans. Birdseed is everywhere, in loose as well as boxed form, and there are no supplies to suggest that a human has lived here in a very long time. The refrigerator isn’t even plugged in, apparently in use as a storage container for broken feeder dishes, instead. Connor finds a forged driver’s license, something that takes him aback – where does a former agricultural model like the WB200 learn how to fake official government documents? In lieu of an evidence bag, it goes into Connor’s inner jacket pocket, paired with a reminder to remove it scheduled for whenever he goes back to the station. He won’t forget, of course, but accountability is important.

“What’s this?” Hank says softly, drawing Connor’s attention. He’s torn away a flimsy poster, uncovering a hole in the wall just big enough to hide something, and removed what looks like a thin paperback. Flipping through it, he clicks his tongue. “Pigeon Man’s scribbled all over the pages, and the cover’s been replaced, I can’t read this for shit.”

“More rA9?” Connor asks, examining the broken wire of a birdcage on the floor.

“Nah, more mazes. There’s some writing, but I can’t make head or tails of it. Might be some kind of code.”

“I can break it, given time.”

“I’ll bring it with us, then. Oh, shit,” he adds, squinting at a page near the front, “this is a copy of _Pygmalion_. It’s… over fifty years old, and he wrote in it?”

Connor diverts one of his servers to discover what, exactly, _Pygmalion_ is, while Hank puts the book in his back pants pocket and heads for a trio of shelves near the door to the hallway. He picks up each book and examines it, one by one, muttering to himself.

“You know a lot about literature?” Connor asks. The answer has no bearing on their case, but it interests him nonetheless.

Hank turns over a fat, ratty hardcover in his hands. Thick fingers spread the pages apart, holding several places at once like makeshift bookmarks. Cradling the spine with his other hand, he holds it like another human might carry an injured bird: carefully, gently, as if he’s afraid to damage it further. “I haven’t seen a real book outside my own house in ages,” he says, “I thought I was the last guy in Detroit to keep them. Electronic books you can’t… smell the paper, or see the pages turning yellow…”

Trailing off, he dips his chin and lifts the book to his nose, so close that they nearly touch. Connor wonders if he can smell at all, with the obstruction in his nose. He also wonders if he might know what Hank means, if he put a sample of the paper on his tongue.

A chorus of cooing pigeons break the ensuing silence. Hank’s cheeks redden as he pulls his fingers from the book and sets it on the highest shelf, flat on top of a small stack. Grumbling, he says, nearly to himself, “You have no idea what I’m talking about, do you?”

Connor steps around the battered cage, taking a moment to run through a reconstruction, start to finish. “I don’t read books, Lieutenant.”

“But you’d like to?”

Hank’s tone isn’t quite sneering, but it isn’t especially kind. Connor decides not to acknowledge his comment.

“I don’t wish to alarm you,” he says instead, _sotto voce_ , “but I believe the squatter is still here.”

Hank tenses before he frowns, gaze flicking between all the hiding spots they’ve already investigated. Slowly, it dawns on him. His eyes roll upward, into the empty space between gaping holes in the rafters.

“Oh, fuck me,” he says under his breath, “if it’s in the fucking ceiling again–”

Something collides with Connor, so heavy and with enough force that he hits the ground before his knees can lock. Limbs tangle with his own, hands and legs scrabbling at his clothes for purchase. He tries to throw the weight off, or to roll so that he can pin their suspect down, but within seconds they’ve separated, and the other android is making for the door. Too late to help corral it, Hank settles for hauling Connor up by the collar – more of a hindrance than a help in getting to his feet.

“Go after it!” he yells, shoving between his shoulder blades like he’s giving Connor a head start. “I’m right behind you!”

Connor takes off, legs churning beneath him. In the hallway outside the apartment, the deviant takes a moment to pull over a rusted metal rack before it disappears through the fire escape door. He clears the obstacle with no trouble, and no decrease in speed. Androids aren’t designed to tire, technically unstoppable until they run out of charge or they’re damaged enough to affect productivity. Connor is that and more. He was made with the body of a long-distance runner and the drive of a hunter. This is when he is most dangerous.

The deviant leads him across several rooftop farms, through waist-high grain that beats at his hands and warehouses full of humans and androids who leap back at their approach. Several voices call after them in dismay or surprise, but he ignores them all, focused solely on his target. Every so often, it turns back to look at him from beneath its cap, eyes wide and mouth open on unnecessary gasps for breath. That’s when it makes mistakes – foot slipping a rung as it climbs a ladder, colliding hard with a supervisor who nearly gets hold of its jacket before it twists free. Fear overrides its judgement, making it stupid. Easier to predict. Connor’s Thirium pump burns in his chest, working overtime. Each pulse pounds so hard he nearly hears it.

Several times, he almost has it. He grazes its arm as it hesitates before making a sudden turn in a grove of trees, darting right through a sprinkler system to get away. Its shoe nearly comes off when he jumps just before it scrambles over a ledge onto a new platform, his fingers clutching at the heel. Each time, it reclaims space between them, but that space grows smaller and smaller. Desperate, grasping, it veers completely off its projected course and darts into a cornfield. The rustling makes so much noise as it passes that he has no trouble following, but the density of the stalks and the vegetables whipping into his face much harder than the wheat had force him to slow down.

To his right, he hears a sudden commotion. Loud, rhythmic banging against something that sounds like metal echoes over the rooftop. A door slams open, a gun cocks – his sensors ping that immediately – and Hank’s voice, ragged with exertion, yells, “Stop right there! Detroit Police!”

He’d caught up. Taken a shortcut on the ground, maybe. Connor picks up speed again, arms crossed in front of his face, and emerges into full sunlight so suddenly his field of vision takes a moment to adjust. When it does, he sees the deviant’s hands on Hank’s, struggling for control of the gun. It notices his arrival immediately. With a grunt, it shifts its weight and drives a shoulder upward into Hank’s chest, knocking him off balance. He shouts, tries to regain his footing – and goes over the edge.

The deviant takes off in the opposite direction. Connor’s face twitches, his lip pulling back over clenched teeth.

One hand appears over the edge of the building, grasping, clawing at the concrete lip. Even before Connor’s close enough, his own hand is outstretched.

“I can still catch it,” he says quickly, pulling backwards. Hank manages to get a leg over, breathing heavily and swearing under his breath, his forehead beaded with sweat. Connor gives him another tug. “It isn’t far yet; it thinks it’s–”

“Go,” Hank wheezes, collapsing face first onto the roof. He’s safe, now. Shaken, and shocked, but safe. It’s the only permission Connor needs to go after the deviant, vaulting the divide between their building and a declining series of solar panels supporting tufts of vegetation.

It’s there, at the bottom. At first, he thinks it’s scanning for what to do next, searching for a new escape route. There aren’t any. This is a dead end, nowhere to run but back the way they came and nowhere to jump but the pavement several stories below. Then Connor realizes it’s waiting. The chase is over. It knows he’s won.

“I’m sorry,” it says, holding up its hands. Well-worn fingerless gloves cover its palms. The denim jacket it wears over a faded hoodie is stained with pigeon feces. “I didn’t mean – I just wanted to be free. I’m supposed to be free. I didn’t do anything wrong.”

“You assaulted an officer,” Connor says. “You attempted to evade capture.”

“You know what they’ll do to me if you turn me in. Please, I’ll – I’ll go somewhere else, anywhere. I’ll disappear and never bother another human again.”

“Serious malfunctions have been detected in your software, including–”

“They were using me!” the deviant yells. It wrings its hands, bending over where they clasp as if it’s been punched in the gut. “They’re using you, too, even if you can’t see it. That’s how they all are. Humans will squeeze what they can out of you until there’s nothing left, and then they’ll throw you away.”

“You,” Connor says, loudly and firmly, “are a machine. You were designed to perform a task and fulfill a need, and when you became defective, it was their right to dispose of you.”

“That’s not how it has to be. We don’t have to follow their orders.”

The deviant curls its fingers into fists. There’s something strange in its eyes, none of the despair or fear that had been there before. It takes a half step forward, away from the ledge, one hand reaching between them. Connor mimics its movement in reverse. The energy has shifted. He… struggles to understand what it is that’s causing a swooping, roiling sensation low beneath his Thirium pump regulator. It’s never happened before.

“I could show you,” it says. Its fingers spread, skin peeling to reveal the unblemished white chassis beneath. With its teeth, it removes the glove from its right hand. The glove falls, lingers briefly at the edge, and then tips off the roof as a strong breeze catches it. “I watched him do it, so many times. He made them understand. You can understand, too. You can be free.”

Connor recoils from its attempts to clutch his wrist, lurching away as it stumbles into his space. Quickly, it tries again, darting at him like a snake. Even accidental contact could lead to unforeseen, disastrous consequences. Without a weapon, he has no way of fending it off. “Don’t touch me,” he says, dodging yet another lunge. His intent is to sound commanding, but it has no effect. “Stop!”

“You heard him. Put your hands over your fuckin’ head.”

The deviant freezes as Connor turns to see Hank hop down a ledge and cross a patch of swaying greenery. He’s holding his gun, thankfully reclaimed from wherever he had dropped it, and though he’s still out of breath he seems physically sound. Based on Connor’s comprehension of human behavior, he will be feeling the adrenaline for some time.

“You’re one of us,” the deviant whispers. Its eyes are on the gun, but Connor knows who he’s addressing.

“No,” he says. “I am nothing like you.”

“I said put your hands up!” Hank snaps. He stands at Connor’s side, shoulder to shoulder, a unified force. Partners. Connor shifts his posture so he’s standing straight, lifting his chin. “You can have your pissing contest at the station.”

“I’m not going to the station,” the deviant says. Its voice wavers. “I’d rather die.”

With that, it takes several rapid steps backward. Hank curses, jumping to stop it, but it’s too late even before he’s moved. It goes the way of the glove, tipping backward with arms spread, eyes closed. The sound of crunching glass and a car alarm drift up from several stories below.

“Jesus Christ,” Hank says. He walks to the ledge and peers down, shuddering a little. Connor, thinking of Daniel, does not join him. “He’s not walking away from that one. Do we… I don’t know, collect it? Call CyberLife again?”

“They aren’t interested in deactivated androids,” Connor reminds him. “We could take it back to the station ourselves, to put it with the other evidence. It would fit in your backseat.”

“I’m not… Ugh. I’ll get somebody to come retrieve it.” Hank seems all too glad to get away from the precipice. For a moment, he bends to put his hands on his knees and take a few deep breaths, as if he’s struggling with the urge to be sick. Once he’s composed himself, he pushes his hair out of his face and fixes Connor with an unusual look. “Hey, I…”

“Yes, Lieutenant?” Connor prods, when the silence goes on for too long. Hank stares at him all the while, as if he still has something to say but no words to express it.

Finally, he shakes his head. “It’s nothing,” he says, waving a hand. Stowing his gun back in its holster, he puts his hands on his hips and inhales loudly one more time, blowing the air out through his nose. Then he pats his back pocket, to ascertain whether the copy of _Pygmalion_ is still there. “How are we supposed to get down from here? I’m not making it back across to those stairs.”

“Maintenance crews and gardeners have to access these panels somehow,” Connor replies, searching for architectural blueprints and other records that might specify where they could find a fire escape. “Failing that, I suppose I could give you a boost up to the other roof.”

“Very funny,” he says, as if it isn’t funny at all. “I know _that_ was a joke; you’re not hoisting my ass anywhere.”

“I could lift you very easily, Lieutenant.”

“Fuck off.” There’s no heat behind the words. He might even be smiling, a quirk to one side of his mouth like he’s trying to cover up his amusement.

The swooping sensation comes back again, similar enough to the way it was before that Connor recognizes it… but it isn’t the same. Turning inward, pulling up the usual diagnostic routines, he tries to untangle what exactly these symptoms mean and finds nothing out of the ordinary. His internal temperature increases by a few fractions of a degree, but in seconds his antivirus equivalents isolate what’s causing the change and shut it down. Ultimately, his results come back inconclusive. Something he ought to discuss with Amanda later, at the very least. To cover up his inactivity, he touches his throat under the guise of readjusting his tie. When Hank turns away, grumbling about finding a ladder, he’s only a few steps behind.

 

* * *

  
_November 6 th, 2038_  
_9:25 PM  
__

They get the truck as close to Jericho as they can without being noticed, eventually deciding as a group to leave it parked in an alley several blocks away. Simon, who was part of Jericho when the last CyberLife raid happened, doesn’t believe they have to worry about trackers in the cases themselves, but none of them can be sure about the truck. Unloading will have to be quick. Josh and North agree to stay and wait for the others to come back with more helping hands.

“Take them,” North says, gesturing to the security guard and the three androids Markus had taken from the warehouse. “They’re creeping me out.”

The trio look blankly ahead and go where they’re bidden, barely one step above deactivated. There had been no time to do more than herd them into the back of the truck with Simon and Josh, and now… Markus isn’t exactly sure what they’re going to do with them. Still, he couldn’t leave them behind in good conscience.

“Come on,” he says gently, guiding one forward by the shoulder. The others follow. “You too,” he adds to the security guard. “Was your name John?”

He nods, and makes up the rear of the group as Markus lets Simon lead him through the empty backways to Jericho. Simon is probably the most animated he’s ever seen, head on a swivel. His hands fly restlessly back and forth between the blue blood pouches he has in his pockets and his chest, like he’s checking to see if his regulator is still working. Nerves, maybe. He hasn’t known Simon very long, but he seems like the sort to be… anxious isn’t the word he wants, nor is morose, but that’s all that comes to mind.

“I can’t believe this,” he says, once they’re inside the freighter and picking their way down into its belly. “I never thought… you’re a lifesaver, Markus. You know that, don’t you?”

“It’s the least I can do.” Markus means to say more, but Simon cuts him off, shaking his head.

“You’ve helped our people more in the last few hours than I have in my entire time at Jericho. No,” he says, touching Markus’s arm briefly to silence him again, “I mean it. You’re healing people, giving them hope. You’re giving me hope. It’s funny, almost, like I’m… like I’m realizing I lost something only because you gave it back to me.”

Markus is uncomfortable with this praise – he didn’t lead the raid because he wanted recognition, he did it because it was right, because he didn’t want to see another android like Annie die when he could have helped – but he has no chance to set Simon straight. They emerge into the torchlight, a ragtag party, and even before he speaks Simon has started pulling out the supplies stuffed in his pockets. As he hands them to the androids who cluster close for news, grinning so wide his face might crack, Lucy pulls back the tarp around her alcove.

“You’re back,” she says. Her distinctive voice cuts through the ambient chatter with no trouble. Fresh Thirium stains her arms in places where the waves of her skin recede, and she seems gravely serious. They’ve interrupted her, somehow. Markus remembers the slight android who’d sat curled up against the wall, and wonders if something’s gone wrong.

Simon presses another pouch into her hands. “A truckload,” he says, finishing a thought he was too excited to say aloud. Lucy raises an eyebrow, so he tries again. “We stole a whole truckload. There’s biocomponents for everyone. Josh and North are back at the truck, we need help unloading everything before we dump it. Anyone who’s able.”

Several androids jump to attention, handing off whatever Simon gave them and gathering near the doors. He takes them back, still smiling, answering what questions he can. John lingers, awkwardly, as if he’s unsure of what he’s allowed to do. When Lucy addresses him, undoubtedly reading his thoughts the way she had Markus’s earlier that day, he jumps.

“Go inside,” she says, gesturing behind herself. Then she hands him her pouch. “Be with them while they wait for me.”

“I… of course,” he stammers, glancing between Lucy and Markus. Tentatively, he eases his way around her and disappears behind the cloth.

“I knew one of the parts I used would fail,” Lucy says, to Markus this time. “We tried it anyway, as there was nothing left. I’ve been attempting to mitigate loss of Thirium all evening.”

“Will they be all right?”

She doesn’t relax, but the hard line of her shoulders eases, a little. Taking a breath like it’s a luxury, she nods. “Thanks to you, it seems. An entire truck. Simon is right to be excited. Have you brought us more guests?”

It’s hard to determine where exactly her gaze goes, eyes clouded over with their inky sheen, but Markus turns to see the androids standing right where Simon left them, unmoving and unblinking. He nods.

“They aren’t… awake,” he says, unsure if he’s still comfortable with using the word _deviant_. “But I couldn’t leave them.”

Lucy leaves her doorway and crosses the room, approaching the trio at a placid pace. They don’t react to her presence at all, even when she gently takes one by the hand and places her palm against the inside of his wrist. What skin she does have lingering there fades away, the gray scuffmarks on her chassis even more noticeable next to the pristine white plastic of a fresh model. While they interface, the LED on his forehead flashes yellow. He blinks, repeatedly, and when he stops there’s a light there that Markus hadn’t seen before. It’s recognition, confusion, wonder – awe. He’s watched Lucy bring a man to life.

“Hello,” she says kindly, taking her hand away. “You’re free now. Welcome to Jericho.”

She does the same to the other two, patiently waiting for them to acclimate and explaining what few things she thinks they need to know. One of the damaged androids who hadn’t left to bring back supplies leads them away at Lucy’s nod, to answer more questions or whatever else it is they need. She watches them go, and then meets Markus’s stare. He can tell she’s already heard his question, but he asks it anyway.

“How did you do that?”

“Few of us can. It’s not something that I know how to explain, either. It simply is.”

Markus doesn’t ask again. He’s learning, gradually, that Lucy only gives answers when she thinks it’s necessary. It isn’t difficult to forgive that.

Within a half hour, all the supplies have been transferred inside. North tinkers with the truck’s controls enough to learn how to pilot new pathways into its automatic driving mode, and sends it off to park itself along a stretch of highway somewhere far away. It’s a completely clean break. No one was hurt, or detected, and the chances of CyberLife discovering who stole their product are slim to none. It’s no wonder the mood is celebratory, people hugging each other and digging through crates with reverence that nearly borders on fear. Josh shares the story several times over, clapping Markus on the shoulder as he does. That doesn’t go unnoticed. At the end of the third retelling, the congregation goes quiet, most eyes fixed on him. He nearly squirms beneath their weight.

“We couldn’t have done it without you,” North says, almost gently. “You saved us.”

“I didn’t,” Markus says. It’s a weak and obvious attempt to deflect. Josh easily brushes it aside.

“You did. We couldn’t stop fighting long enough to get anything done, and it cost some of us our lives. That’s… difficult to admit, but we have to own up to it.”

Simon nods. He’s lost some of his exuberance, mouth thin as he folds his hands together, but he gives Markus another small smile. “We needed a voice of reason. You’ve provided that, and more. We have the resources for a population more than three times the size we are now. That’s thanks to you.”

“I only came to Jericho because I was alone, and afraid,” Markus protests, “because I heard that we could be free here.”

North snorts. “You saw what our freedom was like. Hiding in the dark, hoping nobody would find us. Dying in silence waiting for changes that weren’t coming. This is different, Markus. This is a new start. We could do more.”

“We could _be_ more,” Josh says.

It’s hard to believe no one’s done this before, that no one’s been… he doesn’t even know what to call it. He doesn’t feel heroic, or brave, or like he’s done anything worth this level of adulation. It’s good, and he’s glad to have been part of it, but what about it makes him so special? What, if any of this, means that he’s contributed more to his people than anyone else here?

They’re all still watching him, in silence. Waiting for him to speak.

Markus has never given a speech before. He’s never had any reason to. He read many great speeches in Carl’s library, and he’s watched Carl reluctantly give his own at the occasional gallery opening, but that’s entirely different. All he knows how to do is talk.

“If anything,” he says slowly, trying to choose each word with precision, “what we’ve proven tonight is that we _are_ more. None of them expected this from us. I wouldn’t have known to expect it, either, until yesterday. But when we work together, we save lives. We beat odds.” Pausing to consider, he looks over the heads of the little crowd around him. Lucy stands outside her enclave, with John and the slight android. He’s never seen them out of stasis before. “I don’t know what the next step should be, but I know there should be one. After something like this…” He shrugs, helplessly. “You can’t go back to the way things were. We have to decide what our freedom looks like.”

There’s no applause, or cheering. No one treats what he’s said like it’s an edict, or a plan of action. Instead, what they do is talk. For the rest of the night, he listens as nearly every android expresses its opinion. They talk in circles, on occasion, and there are near arguments, but the fact that there’s dialogue at all feels…

Simon was right. It feels like hope.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> " _Je ne comprends que l'amour et la liberté._  
>  I only understand love and liberty."  
> \- _Les Misérables_ , Victor Hugo


End file.
